Mental origin of species

(a sort of extended postscript)

I was about to comment on my own background and the issues arising from it in my original post, but it's all a bit complicated so warrants a post of its own.

Looking back at the specifics of where my family comes from, I'm a bit of muddle. Genetically, the vast majority of it is English, with a smattering of Scottish - from one of my great-grandfathers - and an even less significant bit of Irish. So far, so (relatively) simple.

Trouble is, there's a good deal more to one's cultural heritage than that. The place in which you were brought up, those in which you've lived for significant periods and the one you choose for your eventual home (if any) will all have a bearing on your cultural identity. Now in some cases these differentiations will be pretty negligible, and in a way I envy such people for having an easy time of it, particularly with regards to choosing a place to live. Essentially, unless you're happy with the life of a nomad, you want to end up in a place that's attuned to your needs, among people with a similar approach to life, and that's not always evident.

Much as I dread the question "where are you from?", I've pretty well let myself in for it here so may as well bite the bullet. I was born in the French Alps to British parents keen to have my brother and me grow up bilingual, which clearly meant spending some time in each country. For the first ten years of my life, the English bit consisted of little more than occasional visits to either set of grandparents, but in due course both of us were sent to school in England, not far from my father's parents. Thus, for the next eight years, I was constantly going between the two countries.

Then I decided to pursue my linguistic studies (French and German, though I ended up dropping the former to concentrate on the latter) in Scotland, which besides proving quite an eye-opener for the little Englander I had been up until then (a whole other post so I'll leave it for now) added another element to my cultural make-up as I remained a student there for seven years - and that's not counting the year I spent in Austria along the way. (Such a short period, proportionately speaking, may not appear to be of much significance, but anyone who's heard me rabbitting on about Vienna will understand.) At the end of my studies I took up a seemingly lucrative position at a hotel in Switzerland; I wasn't particularly happy, though it did serve to confirm my feelings about where I wanted to settle: back in Scotland. I'd first come here in 1993 and even as I left for Switzerland felt so attuned to the Scottish way of life that I could not see myself ending up living elsewhere.

If pushed, therefore, I would identify myself as a Scot by adoption and otherwise a European. What I've written so far may suggest the European bit doesn't stretch beyond France, Britain and Austria, but my childhood was spent in that part of France which is very close to the Italian and Swiss borders, to say nothing of my mother's fluent Spanish taking us frequently on the other side of the Pyrenees.

Which leads me conveniently on to my last point: these influences are more often than not peculiar to individuals. Languages spoken by members of one's immediate family may contribute something to one's childhood, but otherwise only someone keen to explore every facet of a close one's background will be affected by it. For instance, there's a distinct colonial flavour to my father's family - his father was a tea-grower in what was then Ceylon, his mother (who was born in Australia) had been evacuated to South Africa at the time of his birth, and he himself had a fascination for all things Chinese - but none of this has really come to bear on me.

Yet. It took me a while to figure things out where I was concerned, which isn't to say I'll ignore what has gone before. After all, it's sure to prove culturally enriching, so why stop at one continent?