Does this mean that I have moved on to other hobbies? Not a bit of it! A day doesn’t go by when I haven’t fired up Firefox and its 13 Home Page tabs which open up specific pages on the Ancestry site.

So, what have I been doing?

Well, I’ve put my attempt to sort out all the Roscoe surnames, and their variations, on hold but I will return to it in due course.

At the moment, I’m mainly concentrating on tracking Robertsons in the east of Fife on behalf of a friend and it is a slow process because there are quite a few of them and, it being Scotland, it can be pricey too.

Recently, I have also actually ventured out to wander round a cemetery or two which is something I haven’t done in decades. There is a big difference, too, because a digital camera is so much more useful than the old pen and paper. And it is a very pleasant activity on a sunny day with congenial company!

I receive a steady trickle of emails and messages from people who have tripped over my website so can I never predict what I will be doing each day because I never know what tangent I’ll be sent off on next. And I always have the ToDo folder in my email Inbox nagging away at me – I really should open it up.

So much for the update – Firefox, here I come (the blog is open in Google Chrome!)…

I was 19 when I first realised that I had two time bombs strapped to my chest. That was when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer too late for it to be contained and she had a radical mastectomy at the age of 48.

By the time she was 54, Mother had secondaries throughout her body and she committed suicide in an act of self euthanasia so that we wouldn’t have to watch her waste away and die.

That was in 1972 and I had already had one benign cyst removed the previous year. Thus I had embarked on what turned into a series of worrying discoveries and subsequent minor operations to check them out.

Then, true to the family tradition, I developed cancer myself – in my late forties – and had part of my right breast removed. But it had been caught early, there was no sign of any spread to the lymph nodes, and a course of radio therapy was all the treatment I received. I was living in Brussels at the time.

When I returned to Scotland in 1997 I presented myself to my doctor who arranged an appointment with a specialist at a local hospital. He took one look at my family history and sent me off to a geneticist who tutted loudly and told me that I was almost certain to have a recurrence of the disease.

Three grandparents (my grandfather’s prostate cancer counts because it is similar to breast cancer); my mother; and my father’s sister had all succumbed in their forties and I had too. The outlook was bleak.

So, when I was offered a double prophylactic mastectomy, I jumped at the chance to get rid of the time bombs. I was visited by a psychologist to see if I was fit to have such radical treatment, passed the test – get them off me, please! – and my breasts were removed in 1998.

I immediately rejected the idea of reconstruction. For one thing, it would not be straightforward because, having had radio therapy, the skin on that side was unfit for a silicon implant. Muscle would have to be brought around from my back – no thanks! And meeting women who had problems with their implants firmed up the suspicion I already had about them so I opted out of the whole procedure.

For the last thirteen years I have lived with a hollow chest and coped for the most part. I’ve got used to wearing loose clothing – especially when overweight – and tweaking at it to keep it loose. Occasionally, I’ve browsed the catalogues of bras and falsies but never very seriously especially when seeing the cost of the prosthetics.

I have never felt any less of a woman minus my breasts and although there have been times when I’ve wished I could wear more feminine clothing it hasn’t been enough to do anything about it. The cost put me off and it was also wonderful not to have to wear a bra. Early on, I discovered that men don’t find me any less attractive sexually so that wasn’t a problem either.

But this all changed recently when a close friend encouraged me to look more closely at my options. And, last week, I was given some lifelike prosthetics – for free by the NHS – which are nothing like the birdseed one which my mother had forty years ago. Now there will be no stopping me, and my clothing options have suddenly broadened!

And sporting a new pair of spectacles chosen by a panel of my younger daughter and the aforesaid friend – to replace ones which I’ve never felt suited me – I am now almost seeking out mirrors instead of avoiding them altogether. The psychological impact of all of this is obviously far stronger than I ever imagined it would be. Why didn’t I do it before now?

As for the family cancer, my children have my genes and although their family trees aren’t quite as horrific as my own, their chances of developing cancer are high. I had hoped that there would be a cure by now and, hanging on to that hope, there is still a little time left before they hit their mid forties. All I can do is be thankful that ours is a late onset strain, encourage them to be aware, and keep my fingers crossed…

As someone who has always been interested in politics, the referendum on Britain’s voting system presents me with a dilemma I have never encountered before. I have opinions about a lot of political issues: sometimes quite strong ones. But I also have the propensity of a liberal – some would see it as a weakness – to see the other side of an argument.

I strongly believe in controlling the deficit, because I don’t think we should be forcing our children to pay for our failures, but I understand the “stimulus” argument as well. I think personal tax rates of up to 50% are reasonable, but recognise the counter-argument of those who think top-earners might relocate to avoid paying tax. I like the idea of universal benefits, including free access to higher education, but also see the merits of less expensive means-tested arrangements that target the least well-off.

When it comes to voting, however, I am plagued by certainty. I’m sorry: I can’t help it! I simply don’t believe that anyone who genuinely believes in democracy could possibly argue in favour of the first past the post (FPTP) system.

The first general election I remember clearly was in February 1974. The Conservatives came top (11.9 million votes – 297 seats) and Labour “won” (11.6 million votes – 301 seats). The Liberals got 14 seats for 6.1 million votes. I concluded very speedily that my history teacher, who used to extol the virtues of British “democracy”, had somehow got it horribly wrong! 37 years later, I still think this.

The democracy test – 50% plus one

People are influenced by various factors when they cast a vote, but the primary aim is clearly to elect a party or individual. For this to work, the vote has to have a value. In an ideal world, all votes would be of equal value but in reality, no electoral system, even the most proportional one, manages to achieve that. Votes will always be wasted including those given to candidates or parties with very low levels of support, and those cast for winners in excess of what they need. But to pass any reasonable democracy test, a system must guarantee that a certain proportion of the votes cast actually have a value in electing someone. And the bare minimum is surely 50% plus one, the threshold of an Alternative Vote (AV) election in a single member seat.

Under First Past the Post (FPTP), all the votes cast for losing candidates are wasted. So too are all excess votes cast for winners. The only votes that do count are for the winner equal to one more than the score of the second placed candidate. I haven’t done the calculation, but a reasonable estimate is that around a quarter of those who turned out cast a worthwhile ballot in 2010. The other 75% needn’t have bothered. In fact, there hasn’t been a single constituency election since universal franchise where more than half the votes counted (the closest we came to it was in Ilkeston in 1931 when exactly 50% of the votes counted, the National Labour candidate beating Labour by two votes in a straight fight).

It should be obvious that a system that only gives value to a minority of votes is not democratic. So why is it that most people – including many supporters of fair voting – think otherwise? One part of the answer is that Britain has all the other essential facets of true democracy : a secret ballot; freedom to campaign and express opinions; the right to form parties and stand in elections, and so on. These are things that people long for in many other countries, and the fact that they are deeply entrenched in the British political landscape is something we should be proud of. A second explanation is that FPTP has, until now, led to regular peaceful changes of government. You can see why people might instinctively accept the equation “election leading to change of government = democracy” but this is clearly flawed when so few votes have value. The correct equation is “election leading to change of government = not dictatorship”.

First past the post falls at the first hurdle

Essentially, what Britain has at the moment is pluralism, in the sense that everyone can take part. But on the democracy test, because the vast majority of votes end up having no value, FPTP falls at the first hurdle.

David Cameron has taken this most powerful of arguments against FPTP… to argue for its retention! He makes the astonishing claim that votes have equal value under the existing rules and that AV somehow gives an unfair advantage to electors whose initial vote has no value allowing their second preference to come into play. I hope he doesn’t actually believe this. Because if he does, then it’s time we introduced basic maths tests for Prime Ministers.

Other arguments from the “no” side are equally absurd. The idea that AV will help extremists get elected comes from the same school as the Prime Minister’s “equal value” claim. “Take an argument for AV that resonates with voters, pretend it’s ours and hope no-one notices.” It is blindingly obvious that FPTP makes it easier for extremists, because the election threshold is lower.

Then there is the claim that AV is too complicated. This is deeply insulting to English and Welsh voters (the Scots and Northern Irish are already allowed to vote this way so are presumably deemed capable of it). “We think you can manage an ‘X’ but ’1,2,3′ is obviously a bit too much for you to handle!”

No-brainer

In the referendum, the choice is clearly limited by what was possible in the coalition agreement. There is no point in arguing for proportional systems that aren’t on offer. At the moment, single member representation remains sacrosanct, and this will not deliver proportionality except by pure chance. So the question is whether AV or FPTP is better for Britain? If you regard democracy as something fundamental, the answer is a no-brainer. AV delivers 650 (or 600 in the future) individual outcomes each of which is democratic in the context of the constituency in question. FPTP does not. AV doubles the number of votes that have value to 50% plus one in every seat (excluding those who decide to “drop out” of voting by expressing no further preference – which is perfectly legitimate).

So for me, the question effectively being asked in the referendum is: “Do you want democratic elections for the UK Parliament?” Incredibly, it looks increasingly likely that the British people will say “no”. A lot of people on the “yes” side seem ambivalent, half-hearted and apologetic about AV. They need to come out with all guns blazing, highlighting in particular, the grotesque way that FPTP cheats voters. Alternative Vote is greatly superior because it greatly reduces the number of pointless trips to the polling station. And, to counter the most ridiculous argument I have heard so far from the “no” side, it is a lot more “British” – assuming that we still believe “fair play” to be one of our defining national characteristics.

The last time I saw Mother was in October 1971. I lived in North Argyllshire but had travelled south to Croydon with my (first) husband for my younger brother’s (first) wedding. I was five months pregnant and it hardly showed. Mother, it transpired, was suffering from secondary cancers and her distended abdomen made her look more pregnant than I was and we told her so. But we didn’t know she was ill.

Her primary cancer was breast cancer and she had had a lump for a while before any medic took it seriously. So, when they decided to give her a radical mastectomy, in 1966, it was obvious that it had spread.

In 1969 she was found to have a benign brain tumour and the resulting operations left her suffering regularly from horrendous headaches. And she was never quite the person we had known all our lives, after that experience.

On 29 March 1972 – the day my son was born in Inverness – she was content. Her first grandchild had arrived safely, all three of her children were, it seemed, happily married, and she had met and approved of my father’s mistress and told him that he should marry her (which he subsequently did).

But Mother knew she was ill. And, after waiting for my son to be born, a visit to her GP confirmed it. He arranged for her to visit the breast clinic at Guys Hospital and she knew she would be admitted immediately. So she made her plans.

Choosing a day when my younger brother and his medical student wife were visiting, she locked away her diamonds and, leaving notes about an outstanding grocery bill and some knitting she had been doing for my baby, she made her way to the attic spare room. With her she took her late mother’s sleeping tablets, a glass, a jug of water, a bucket, a pad of paper and a pen. She climbed into the bed, took the tablets, and fell asleep as she wrote. The note was addressed to her husband, my father, and told him how much she loved him.

My brother and his wife found her which was her plan – she didn’t want my father to do so on his own. The coroner’s verdict was suicide due to cancer because the autopsy found she was “riddled” with it.

But I like to think it was self euthanasia.

Today I visited the local cemetery for the first time ever taking my younger daughter with me. My mother has no grave – she had no funeral and was cremated – but the one we visited is that of a neighbour who was a beloved grandmother, mother, and the teenage sweetheart of her grieving widower. She died last November and yesterday her family marked Mother’s Day by visiting her resting place together. I was unwell on the day of her funeral and I chose today to pay my respects to her because it has been a special day for me too.

I am not religious and never have been and probably would describe myself as an agnostic, if I have to say anything. But the truth is that none of us know what happens next when we die, if anything. However, I would love to think that somewhere out there, somewhere in the ether, are those people whom we have loved and lost patiently waiting for us to join them. But I shall have to wait and see, won’t I? As will you!

So I have surprised myself this week because I haven’t even been following politics closely for the past year.

But when I heard the news, at the weekend, that fellow Lib Dem Hugh O’Donnell MSP had resigned from the party and is standing as an independent candidate for the Central Scotland Regional List, I immediately emailed him to wish him luck and found myself offering to do a website for him!

The website is up and running at www.hughodonnell.org.uk and here I am, beavering away on his behalf – who’d have thought it less than a week ago? We never know what’s around the next corner, do we?

My premonition was correct. The holiday was a disaster and we had rowed a lot – we shouted at each other in the quiet streets of a French town – and I dumped him as soon as we got home. But I was pregnant and knew it as soon as I missed the first period and started feeling squeamish in the mornings.

I was 38, a divorced single mother with two young children, and on social security benefits. So having another child, especially by a different and absent father, was absolutely out of the question.

My children are my life. I dote on my children. I always have and I always will for they are a part of me. But I could not have this child: this part of me had to be destroyed.

I contacted an ex lover who rushed over (my children were away for the weekend with their father). He brought a test kit for me and a large bottle of vodka for himself which he drank straight down from the bottle. But he held me all night whilst we waited to perform the test. And he then rang my far-flung family and they arranged everything for me.

A wonderful man, this ex lover, he was a long-term alcoholic and I loved him dearly but we knew we had no future. However, he had transformed me – a battered wife for many years – from an agoraphobic into a part-time student at the local college (which is where I met the father of this child) but that is another story.

The first hurdle was to obtain the permission of two doctors. I didn’t want to tell my own GP because it was too close to home and this had to be a secret so I headed for a private clinic in Glasgow.

The male doctor asked me about the man who had compromised me. Compromised? I was a consenting adult who had been enjoying a very good sex life, thank you very much! The second doctor turned out to be heavily pregnant which was a bit awkward. More so for the others, I imagine, since I was able to chat to her about having children.

Permission was, however, granted without any question because of my circumstances but my heart went out to the pair of frightened students who were there – they were denied it.

I was then to go to a Liverpool clinic and a planned trip to my father’s in London was altered. He met our train from Scotland in London and I handed him my children in exchange for an envelope containing the £100 I needed for the abortion. Then I stepped onto a Liverpool train and headed for my younger brother.

My brother was working so I took his place in his bed with his wife and we talked before we slept. She later told me she couldn’t believe how calm I was about what was about to happen but I had to be, didn’t I? I couldn’t think about what I was actually doing, could I? She then drove me to the clinic and sat with me until I was admitted.

It was a 24-hour arrangement. Admitted first thing one morning, discharged first thing the next. Begowned and besocked, I spent the entire morning waiting along with my room mates. It was a time to swap confidences and fend off the pangs of hunger.

There were four of us in the room and the others were all in their teens or twenties. The first had enjoyed an office party too much, the second was terrified that her parents would find out, and the third had got too close to her cousin on a family holiday and he had brought her to the clinic.

There were also two Irish women there and I discovered that it was what the wealthier women did – travel to Liverpool – because abortion was not legal in their country. They probably still have to do that, I’m not sure!

I told the father. In an angry phone call demanding a lift to Glasgow, in fact, but I had left it to the last minute and he was unable to oblige. I also rang him when it was over because he asked that I do so. And a short while later he gave me £100 which he could ill afford but it made me feel a bit better. I don’t know if he has ever had any children.

My GP found out, of course, when I presented him with the clinic’s letter six weeks later. He was very supportive and told me off for not going to him immediately.

Do I regret having an abortion and destroying my baby? No, never, because I had to think of my two living children, I had to put them first. We women have to face the worst of all decisions at such a time and it is ours and ours alone. But my sympathies go to the fathers as well for they are a part of it too. And nowadays it seems as if some girls look upon abortion as a form of contraception and I do worry about the long-term effects of this attitude.

Some would say that we who don’t want to have a child should abstain from sex, especially those of us who aren’t actually married. That is, of course, the obvious answer – simple, isn’t it? But one can’t turn off the desire by the turn of a switch. We all need to be held close and have the companionship of a loving partner and it is part of what we humans are. That need, that desire, never goes away and sex is a part of it, the icing on the cake.

As for what happened next, it was a couple of years before what I had suppressed came to the surface along with some of my other bad experiences. That was when I had a minor mental breakdown and took time off to recover my equilibrium in a locked ward in the local hospital. But that is yet another part of my story.

However, I did stumble across a speech my friend Tony (Lord Greaves) made in the House of Lords on 20 January and I liked this section:

“… we live in a media environment which is one of the worst in the democratic world. The media observe policy differences and call it a split; they observe policy discussions and call it a row; they observe compromises and call it a betrayal; they observe trade-offs and call it broken promises; they observe a refusal to agree with consultation responses and call it ideological stubbornness; they observe changes as a result of consultation and call it a U-turn; and if they do not see any of these things they invent them.”

The UK is in dire straits financially. And some of our politicians are attempting to sort things out and have genuinely set aside their points scoring and political posturing in order to do so.

But it is an uphill battle and surely time for the opposition parties, the unions, and – most of all – the media to start pulling their weight too, isn’t it?

* Scunnered: a Scots word meaning to be disgusted, bored or simply fed up

It’s all there, the stuff which hits the headlines in the gutter press. Although, come to think of it, not quite all. No murder features in my life – not yet – unless you count the next door neighbour who was murdered by her daughter. Or the sister of an acquaintance who was murdered by her husband, wrapped up in a carpet, and stashed in the coalshed. I could include them, couldn’t I?

But the rest is there: cancer; divorce; incest; rape; abuse (mental and physical); addiction; agoraphobia; mental breakdown and hospitalisation in a locked ward; suicide; abortion; and I could go on. I’ve even dated an ex jailbird!

My parents both hit the newspapers when they died and I long since decided that they warrant a chapter of their own because of the secrets in their relationship.

It would also be cathartic and they say that revenge is sweet! The brother and the husband who abused me are in relationships, have partners in their old age. I have no-one and their treatment of me is the reason I am alone and should not attempt to find that kind of happiness. It simply isn’t fair!!!

2011 has dawned and it is confession time. There are too many secrets but there are some which will remain hidden because I still care about the other participants and don’t seek revenge against them. So I think what I’ll do is dip into the story, here and there, as the mood takes me. Watch this space!

Not that they really had any choice, of course. And Cameron – I give him his due – really wants to make the coalition work. But the Thatcher Tories themselves don’t change their spots and the Torygraph has proved that this week.

Just what are they trying to achieve? Yes, yes, making the Lib Dems look bad – what did I say about spots?

A Liberal from birth – determined that those who have should always help those who haven’t – I watched the old-fashioned Tory ethic of looking after the workers disappear under Thatcher. So now they say they have worked for what they have, that the rest of us only need to work to get what they have, and why the hell should they share it?

No, no, no! It doesn’t work like that. Why can’t they see that no-one is worth the many £££££s per minute some earn in jobs they love? The numbers are sometimes obscene but they lord it over us telling us they deserve it. Bollocks! Shouldn’t they earn less than the person having to clean their toilet because that person is performing vital work which they can’t possibly love?

Although I am, of course, somewhat shocked by their naïvety, this week, I am delighted that our ministers have proved to me that they are still the people I thought them to be. I don’t know Dr Vince personally but always expected him to find his post difficult; Professor Steve has lived and breathed fairness for so long that I adore him; and Edward and Mike are also, and always will be, truly bluly (!) liberal.

So, this week, they have proved to us all that despite sharing a bed with those hated Tories not one of them has turned. Bravo, I say!

Thatcher painted the spots on her Tories and they are there to stay. Anything to undermine the Lib Dem ethics is their mantra. Don’t let the voters see how fairness works. Anything to get rid of them.

As I said, just what is the Torygraph trying to achieve? Have they secretly recorded any of the Tories? I doubt it very much.

And, more importantly, have they looked at the consequences? Killing the coalition, undermining and getting rid of the pesky Lib Dems appears to be the agenda. But what will happen next – have they even thought about that? What will happen to the country?

Recently, I decided to tackle as many of the Ancestry records as I can so I have been working my way through the National Probate Calendar on their website. Records give the date and place of birth and also mention members of the family which is really useful for fitting the pieces together. I enjoy the challenge of sorting it all out.

I will transfer a lot of the records to the Gritquoy website eventually, but don’t hold your breath!

It is also interesting to see how much each individual was worth at the time of their death. Three of my great grandfathers are there:

• Rev Alexander Sandison – born on Yell, Shetland, in 1854 and died in South Croydon, Surrey, in 1921 – left £1,022 10s 10d.

• Robert William Gold – born in Battersea, Surrey, in 1856 and died in Cuckfield, Sussex, in 1937 – left £3,416 10s 1d. He was an Inspector with H M Customs.

• Rev John Roscoe – born in Kirkby, Lancashire, in 1861 and died in Ovington, Norfolk, in 1932 – left £1,575 17s 0d.