Yet, I need to begin before I began. There is no escaping random circumstances and events shaping past generations, and therefore the present one.
“Like everyone else I cannot escape the effects of my forbearers’ actions, hopes, burdens, struggles and traumas as they responded and adapted to their varied circumstances and their unintended consequences. As a result many invisible, and perhaps unknowable, complex threads connect the generations. I was born when the Second World War in Europe had just ended. I was one of its accidental products. Without the war my parents would not have married, let alone met. Without the war I would not have been born! My father might have married Maya, the woman he was in love with.” Jules Townsend
