Published on 12, July, 2020
II'm amazed at how many people here say English isn't thier first language and presumably thier heritage isn't either. How fascinating, in my stunning and vast ignorance I'd assumed that most people here would be from the UK, how international are we as a group of users? By the way I think multinationalism and multiculturalism are great, so I'm not trying to make anyone uncomfortable or unwelcome.
I'm English and have the usual English problems with language, I can be dyslexic in as many languages as you want to try me with, including English. I recently had my DNA tested with an ancestry site as I was researching my family history and found that I'm 84% southern English, which is apparently quite rare, most British people are a mix of Saxon, Irish and Scandi genes, so it looks like my families have been knocking about the place for hundreds of years.
I live in Wiltshire. I moved to there from Southend in Essex to be near my chosen daughter(AKA stepdaughter)I was born in what is nowadays called Kinshasa, democratic republic of Congo. I'm 67, and have a younger brother and sister. My father got a scholarship to King Edward's Birmingham, and then rather than going to uni chose to become an army officer. He soon switched to working at the Foreign office. Where a few years later he met my mother. She was very intelligent, but like my father chose to not go to uni. From the age of 4 to 18 I lived in England, Bangkok,San Francisco, and Zurich. I went to prep and then public school from 8 to 18.It was not a good experience as I was bullied at both, especially so at public school. Nearly 50 years later I still struggle with the psychological effects of it. My parents separated in 1978 and divorced in 1983. My father took up a post as consul general to Atlanta in 1981. At the time I was either in a halfway house for those with SMI, or in psych hospital. On finishing his posting there he chose to retire and stay in the USA, rather than become ambassador to the Gabon etc. Between 1981 to when he died last year I saw him roughly once a year, apart from visiting him for 2 weeks in 1995. In 1996 he was protocol advisor to the Atlanta Olympic games.
After divorcing my father my mother did a receptionist's course, and got a job as an assistant library manager. She was not ambitious career wise. She had an increasing alcohol problem. Was either problem drinker or alcoholic. IMO she was self medicating.