I don't often tell people but I am fascinated by where I came from. Not geographically, although that's just as interesting in some respects, but from a people point of view. Who my ancestors were and that sort of thing. Not necessarily hundreds and hundreds of years ago but relatively recently. One of my recurrent 'what if's' is the thought of meeting say my grandmother at my age and having a chat and a cup of tea with her, my great grandmother (the original Mina Carter) and so forth.

The whole idea fascinates me, I mean, I know names and dates... I know where these people fit into the family tree but I don't KNOW them. I have my memories of my grandmother, but they're a child's memories and likewise my mother's memories of my great-grandmother (who died before I was born). But I think it would be wonderful to know them as people, find out what made them tick, try and see things in them that were passed down to me.

They passed on a lot. From someone I got the ability to make ice-cream. Real, thick, creamy homemade ice-cream. It's something I didn't think anything of until someone else told me there was a knack to it, so someone gave me that. I can shoot - used to be a markswoman (which has lapsed because guns in britian after Dunblane, not so easy now) - which I get from someone else. Hard to tell that one actually since both sides of my family have immense military connections. One of my grandfathers was an explosives expert but I've never tried blowing anything up. You never know, I might be good at that too! So lots of little things that I can do, or find easy to learn and I'd love to know where that ability came from. I can pretty much make anything with my hands, so perhaps that's the skill rather than the individual abilities themselves, perhaps it's just an umbrella thing.

Anyway, messages through time.

I keep a book for my daughter. It has photos, the tags from when she was born, little momento's through her life. And I add letters everynow and then, catching her up with where we are and whatnot as though I am talking to her across the years when she is at the age I am now. Telling her all the little things she does that make me smile, recounting stories and how I feel. It sometimes something I feel silly doing, I don't know why but it's something I feel I need to do. So *touch wood* if anything ever goes wrong and she's without us then she can look back and see how much she is loved.

Well, I felt silly about it until today.

I went down to my fathers office to collect some paperwork from there and whilst I was there I picked up an old book. It's a book of fairytales that's been on the shelf in there for years. It was mine from my childhood and I wanted to get it to start reading them to my daughter. Out of habit I opened it up to look in the fly-leaf and there's a message written there I had forgotten all about. It's from my grandmother, to me. It says...