History and people have ALWAYS fascinated the heck out of me!  Since I was a little person Ive possessed a passion, an obsession with both of these topics. My foster parents had oodles....OODLES of old 1930s, 40s, 50s & 60s National Geographic magazines which I spent hours upon hours looking through as a kid, sometimes just spending hours looking into the faces of people from all over the world from every culture wondering about them and their stories. 

I'm a sticky beak, no doubt about it...I gotta know what & why people are the way the are. What motivates them. Where they came from, who they come...I just love to listen to peoples stories. 

I grew up with foster parents who themselves grew up in the Depression...Yup, they were Depression kids. Their experiences of  growing up in that time had a major impact on how they parented me and my foster siblings. How food was bought and prepared, how Chrissie presents were carefully opened how the tape pulled off carefully so the paper  could be ironed out and reused. Yup, even my school lunches were wrapped in the saved plastic sandwich bread bags or a cut down butchers  paper bag. Completely embarrassing for the 70s kid I was, especially when my peers came to school with their lunches wrapped in Glad Wrap or God forbid....Ziploc bags!! We didn't have bottled vegetable cooking oil we had a dripping tin (I still don't get where vegetable oil comes from). We didn't have margarine, we had butter, and no Gravox for this kid...gravy was made in the roast tin from the drippings...and....every morsel of leftover food was saved, no Tupperware, it was put in the fridge on a plate with another plate over the top. To this day in 2019 I'm notorious for keeping leftovers, even the most ridiculous, smallest, non edible portion of a sandwich, (though mine become moldy science projects). But why? Because that is what you did! That is what was modeled to me and no doubt those behaviors were modeled to my parents by their own Depression parents.

Christmas and Easter times...Oh Yes!  The best times, the best memories, not because of presents, chocolate and  yummy roast dinner dinners. But because of family and family gatherings and family stories and yarns and, what I always thought were arguments over religion and politics...but what my Uncle Les always said where "Friendly discussions with raised voices" Haaa. I spent endless hours just listening to the yarns of the old people.

Those old people are now all long gone from this planet but, their stories live on with me, in me.  Boy...I miss those days! You know someone once said to me years ago;