I apologise

... to regular readers. I was looking through recent posts earlier today (I was on the couch and Nancy was lying on my shoulder/right arm so I was just trying to find a way to entertain myself while she slept, I know this sounds pathetic (a) because she's not a baby, and it is the kind of thing that pathetic cat people do and (b) I don't need to make up excuses for why I read my own writing, but that's what happened) and I realise that I don't often read the last few posts when I write something, so I repeat myself quite a bit. I can only imagine what it would be like to read the whole last 15 years of this blog, I bet I basically replicate whole posts, it's a bit depressing to realise I can actually do that, that my way of presenting material is that formulaic. 

I saw on tiktok this evening (Nancy was on my arm, probably) some new reconfiguration of a tetris-type game that idealised it as a way of gauging how 'old' your brain is. The idea is that you tell it how old you are (oddly, they had a woman who was basically a girl, so, probably 20) saying she was 44, and then she is so bad at the tetris-y game that it's apparently proven she has the brain of a 53-year-old. Firstly, I get why if you wanted to market some shitty app to kids, you'd make it so you're bagging old(er) people, but I don't get why the 20 year old is '44', and nor do I get promoting a game that bags you if you make a mistake by suggesting your brain is old. But what do I know, I'm older than 20, 44, and 53 (not combined, but sometimes it feels like it). 

I have Moths in my past. No listen, this is weird. About five years ago (?) I signed up to MyHeritage, whatever that literally is, but I had completely forgotten about it, but I got an email from them yesterday saying someone had added to my family tree, or made a match or something (yes it's a bit dating-app-y but maybe that works for the genies). I checked it out, someone had added some ancestors to my mother's mother's father's family, and his grandparents were Sarah and William Moth. I'm not kidding. I didn't know there was a surname Moth, although I looked in the white pages and, well, there's one Moth in the phone book. It's kind of cool though god I'm glad my name isn't Moth, though of course it wouldn't be via those people, because it's my mother's mother's father's mother's father's father. Then I got a message from some guy who is related somehow (I'm not entirely sure how) to my mother's mother's grandfather's sister - I think - though he said he was not related to her but to her husband's children. He's going to send me the family tree link so I can make sense of that. After which I am going to try hard to forget it. I don't want to become a genie.

I have a book in the spare room which is my father's mother's outline of her, and my father's father's, lineages. It's pretty zany. I looked some of them up in the newspapers but they didn't do anything amazing, and most irritatingly, if they buried gold bullion somewhere well it doesn't say. I just wonder whether my father's father's family, the most brutish and sad of the four grandparental forebears, all bent down to pick things up the way I do, in a way that I realised to my strong irritation is the same way my grandfather did. Like a monkey finding a berry.