Go on – find out who you really are

Here I sit, co­cooned in a moun­tain val­ley in the time­less Pri­o­rat, British-born, Cat­alo­nia-com­mit­ted, alarmed by the jin­go­ism and racism in my old coun­try that's been stirred like mud from the bot­tom of a deep pond. The di­vi­sive and de­press­ing Brexit vote on Eu­rope seems to be more and more about iden­tity, like a host of desta­bil­is­ing face-offs around the frac­tious globe.

I rub my chin, fret about the dishar­mony and, sub­se­quently, rel­e­vantly, won­der who I re­ally am. No, I mean, who I RE­ALLY am. Where on Earth did I come from?

I'm in­creas­ing lost in the grim fog of re­al­i­sa­tion that the older I get the less I know, chiefly about my­self. Eng­lish? There's not a lot to go on. Oh, there are the hand-me-down an­ces­tral ex­pla­na­tions from old rel­a­tives (now un­able to ex­pand on their the­o­ries of the blood­line) which have al­ways been itchy as well as un­com­fort­ably, lu­di­crously vague.

Like a lot of peo­ple I've pat­ted my­self on the back, metaphor­i­cally, for hav­ing man­aged to edge my way back­wards for five gen­er­a­tions along the low­est branches of the fam­ily tree, but the height was hardly dizzy. I'm barely off the ground, while above me bal­loons the mon­u­men­tal Mar­tin Kirby oak of ex­is­tence, the canopy of which, of course, is out of sight, tow­er­ing to the be­gin­ning of all life, an oak no more or else stag­ger­ing than yours, than that of each and every­one one of us.

Oh come on. It's got to have played on your mind at some time. Who were your an­cient an­ces­tors? Where did they come from? Are you truly 100 per cent Cata­lan or Dutch, or French or....?

Most prob­a­bly not, of course, but what are the an­swers? I'm la­belled as Eng­lish, but what about the Welsh and Scots lin­eage, or even the con­fi­dent but never sub­stan­ti­ated ro­man­tic tale of Iber­ian blood? And my name is Viking, ap­par­ently, not that I've ever felt duly em­bolden or in­clined to don a hel­met with horns.

Toni Alba got me think­ing dur­ing his bril­liant “Ser or no ser Cata­lans?” book tour when he mused on our ori­gins and the great jour­neys and tribal blend­ing that were the mak­ing of us.

And an­other rea­son I am pre­oc­cu­pied is be­cause it is Sep­tem­ber, the month of my birth, and I'm about to blow €100 on my­self, the inner me: My DNA to be pre­cise.

By the time you are read­ing this I should have the an­swers, just like the jaw-drop­ping vol­un­teers in the DNA analy­sis short film now seen by more than seven mil­lion peo­ple. Frankly, every­one should see it. Search on YouTube for Momondo – The DNA Jour­ney.

I de­spise racism which I'm sure puts me in the vast ma­jor­ity. Imag­ine if we all knew ex­actly how di­verse and glo­ri­ous all our his­to­ries are, how con­nected we truly are. No more talk­ing then of ma­jori­ties and mi­nori­ties. We would be the one human race.

PS I promise to share my re­sults.....