Today was another of those days when the renovation of our house managed to consume a substantial part of the day without us actually doing anything that would look particularly dramatic in a photograph. There was no new wall appearing, no roof disappearing and no major piece of construction machinery involved. Instead, we moved boxes, cleaned things, threw old things away, tested the new dishwasher and generally tried to transform another small part of a construction project into something that begins to resemble a home. These days are less spectacular than the major stages of a renovation, but I am beginning to think they are just as important. There comes a point when a renovated house has to stop being a collection of completed building jobs and start becoming a place where we can actually live. The kitchen finally starts becoming a kitchen We had quite a lot of kitchenware stored away in boxes, some of it for a very long time. Today we started moving a good par...
By the time Saturday was finally winding down, it was already well past 22:00. The New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc I had unexpectedly found in a Moldovan supermarket earlier that evening was now open beside me. I had a computer in front of me, a nice bottle of wine within reach and, more importantly, the entire Internet available for entertainment. There are probably more sensible ways to spend a Saturday night. I opened my family-tree database. That was the end of any realistic prospect of going to bed at a reasonable hour. The doctor with three wives One of the important unresolved points in the German side of my family tree concerns my great-grandfather — the father of my German grandfather. He was a medical doctor and, over the course of his life, had three wives. That much I knew. What happened around those marriages, however, had become obscured by the usual family fog that accumulates when information is passed verbally from one generation to ...