Today I thought I would tell you a bit about my family.
This is my Dad as a teenager in his school uniform, if you can believe it. He has one sister who is a year younger, they lived in Auckland, Singapore briefly and then Palmerston North. When he was growing up bicycles were the coolest things to have, but he had a scooter. He and his sister picked up pine cones for pocket money among other labour type jobs. There was a girlfriend at sixteen and she convinced him to upgrade his motorbike. After school he went to Massey University to study mathematics.
This is Mum at a similar age. She grew up on a large farm in central Hawkes Bay with four siblings; three sisters and one brother. All of them were significantly older so as a young child she was perhaps a bit lonely. She attended a boarding school in Napier as a teenager where she made a best friend on her first day there. She then spent her weekends at her friends place and she in return came to the farm on holidays where they rode horses and read The Exorsist. Mum went to Massey University in Palmerston North after school but decided it wasn't for her and started work as a secretary.
They met when Mum placed an ad in a newspaper for a flatmate and Dad turned up. When they were flatting they ate horrible meals like stuffed sheep hearts, listened to their flatmate fart echoingly in the bathtub and combined record collections; which I know because when they gave me the collection there were two of the same Fleetwood Mac records. They got married when they were twenty two.
When they were twenty-six they had Thomas, my brother. There was also a cat called Egbert and a beard which may or may not have been named.
Five years later I came along.
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