I opened the parcel from Canada. Inside was a beautiful travelogue presented as a book by author “Ann Jones”. My colleague Ann Jones, seated opposite me, said that this wasn’t her. From a quick inspection of the contents page we worked out that my cousin DT had adopted the pen name “Ann Jones” for a self-published account of her summer holiday in Europe. I was astonished that she had so much to write about such a short trip. Particularly impressive were the exhaustive histories of my ancestors, as well as those of another cousin in Somerset.

Meanwhile another relative was causing me no end of trouble. Eighteen years after her death my paternal grandmother was back! I’d spent hours organising a set of tiny black and white photos from the early twentieth century to be used later in a collage (when really I should have been revising for my finals). I could recognise some of the faces and locations of the shots, but most were unknown to me. Granny – the one person who held most information about the pictures – took it upon herself to sort them further. Her method was to keep only photos for which we had certain information. By the time she had finished her audit most of the pictures were crumpled in the bin, and my collage project was no longer viable.