There was I poodling along...not a bother on me...when I began to wonder whether or not this was too good to be true.
I'd reached the 1200's you see in someone's tree and was getting quite blasé...plenty of records to check the facts...the dates were slightly iffy but then dates often are...
And it was nothing but fibs from start to finish...not for the folk whose people they are of course...but for the tree I'm compiling, it's a pack of lies.
Back I went over it...again and again checking and re-checking, until I found one person who was 'wrong'...just one wrong person led me to increase that tree by about fifty people...not one of whom has anything whatsoever to do with the family I'm researching.
As I was deleting them...never seems kind to me to delete people...Molly decided she was bored and offered to come and help...she sat down in the middle of the keyboard and washed her bottom first...then she wanted to sit on my lap which is fine, but she jiggles about and won't keep still...
She kneads my legs and purrs like a steam train going round a bend...then falls off onto the floor but not before digging her claws in to save herself.
Feeling silly for falling into a heap on the floor, she took a sudden leap on to the top of the bookcase over my desk and weaved her way between books before wondering whether she could walk across the little set of shelves which holds very old and extremely fragile china...
Her ears pricked up and her eyes grew dark...she'd heard the horses coming...another leap and she landed on the windowsill just in time to see Mustapha and Princess sauntering by...unaccompanied by owners.
Now Mustapha is about sixteen hands...big, in other words...he dances about and has the tendency to suddenly rear up...Princess is smaller and mean-tempered. The sort of horse who lets you stroke her nose then nips your hand and won't let go.
So I pretended I hadn't seen them.
Time was I'd have gone out and bawled at them to go back home...now I can't honestly be bothered. They'd only escape again.
Finished deleting all those interesting people who lived in interesting times and Molly went back to sleep...curled up next to Murphy, who'd slept through all the excitement.