What is the stuff legends are made of? No idea, but we all leave our footsteps behind.  I heard a lot about grandad. He was born in the East End of London in a working class family. Education was more luck than judgement, but he did go to school until he swore at the teacher as a boy and somehow I think that ended his days at school. Mum said he would sit with the men when they were gambling at the end of the street, and that is where he got his vocabulary, a family legend. We have a wonderful collection of beer mugs at home that grandad brought home from the various pubs he worked in as a carpenter. That is what mum told me and Aunt Lil confirmed it, They were nice beer mugs, so perhaps there was something in that legend.

It was Aunt Lil that told me that our ancestors. They were rich wine merchants from France and had a lot of property in London, but the deeds got burnt in a church fire. That is the stuff that legends are made of, until you do family research and discover that yes, the ancestors were rich, they were Huguenots that escaped the purge of protestants in France and eventually arrived in London. Their name was a little different to the East End pronounciation of aunt Lil but I did find them in the family tree. One of them did have money, but was something like a distant cousin many times removed. No deeds burnt in a church fire and no wine. He had coal barges and one of them was even used for the rescue of english troops on the D-day landings. I think Aunt Lil was permanently waiting for the day of her rightful inheritance.

I married a Swiss, they are all bankers that sleep with gold bars under the bed. Unfortunately this legend did not exist in my Swiss family, my mistake, but I am patient.

I can tell you of the Angloswiss that wrote blogs almost every day. She welcomed people when she was eating breakfast in the morning with a cheery “Good Morning” blog, although sometimes it was not such a good morning after a restless night and would rather have stayed in bed for another hour. She broadcasted her deeds of the day and became a legend in her own time. She continued to blog in the afternoon and will probably be blogging permanently in the afterlife, a legend in her own time.

Legends are everywhere, arn’t they Santa?

Legends are Everywhere