A lot of evidence suggests that human-kind was born in
Africa and eventually travelled to the rest of the world. Genetic finger printing and the study of languages even agree on the routes followed by those ancient tourists.It depends what you mean by aristocracy, I suppose.
The word aristocrat generally means someone who has a lot of land and perhaps a lot of money who dresses grandly or elegantly, who speaks like a snob, walks with his nose in the air, would have lost his head to the guillotine and
his dignity to a banana skin.
Another sense might be someone who has a lot of ancestors. Well, steady on there - we all have the same number of those. Perhaps, then, someone who knows the names of a lot of ancestors,
or of those people who are supposed to be his ancestors.
What about animals, now? Are there aristocratic species, species which have remained the same through millions and millions of years? Not Homo sapiens,
certainly; we only turned up about 300,000 years ago. Not horses either. They evolved in North America, spread through China to Europe and then, about the time old sapiens appeared, the horse became extinct in
America. Reintroduced by Cortes to America, Cortes was able, with only fifty people, sixteen horses and a few pistols and muskets to conquer those great empires of the Aztecs and the Incas. The smallpox and measles
viruses he brought along also helped a great deal. The horses then spread Northward to the great plains, and the North American Indians became splendid, heroic tribes eventually conquered by those mere Europeans and their
hand viruses.
But consider the homely cockroach. Unchanged for 250 million years. He remains a damned nuisance, but a successful one. His behaviour has much in common with ours. Not Bajan behaviour but
human behaviour. He doesn't do anything particularly well, except survive. He's not much good at flying nor at running, but he's a pretty good dodger. He's unable to look like a twig or a leaf, but he's good at
looking like nothing much. He can eat meat, fish, veg, salad, slugs, snails, and kitchen spills. And he's a whizz kid at reproduction. Do you see the resemblance, dear reader? Perhaps he is more like your
cousin. Anyway, he's one of the most aristocratic land animals around.
But let's get back to human ancestry. If one tries to trace one's family back, with the help of birth and baptismal registers, marriage registers
and, best of all, with wills, one can get some names and some probabilities. On my father's side I managed about 95% certainty to 1795, 60% to 1725 and only 30% to 1634. My mother's male ancestors disappear into the
Devonshire peasantry in 1800. Tracing these things is a harmless amusement, I think, but of no real value. You may have got some names, but what do they tell you about the genes?
Go back five generations and you and I
each have 128 ancestors; ten generations and we have 4028. In that genetic waterfall must be genes from the Romans, the Celts, the Saxons, the French, the Jews, the Germans, and certainly the Africans.
The terms Black and
White were never ever accurate in describing people. It's time they went right out of fashion. If we must use words to describe the colour of those parts of our anatomy which are seldom sunburnt, then whitish and
blackish are far more accurate and far less confrontational.
In Europe it used to be fashionable for ladies to preserve their milk-white complexions by wearing large hats and staying out of the sun.
Fortunately for our major
industry they will now spend serious money to lie in the sun almost naked on a beach, reading Joan Collins, getting bored, getting sand everywhere, and intending to get a first degree burn. Why do they do it?
A first degree
burn causes oedema or swelling of the skin itself, so it temporarily erases most of those little wrinkles which gather after the age of 25. Other people, perhaps, will say "Darling, you look so well".
First degree
sunburn also causes a gain in skin pigment. If the sun is used with too much enthusiasm this pigment soon falls off in tiny itchy flakes. But if the burning is carried out with great restraint the pigment may last all
the way back to Europe or Canada, and even a week or two longer, demonstrating to all the world that you are rich enough to take a holiday in a ski resort, or even so absurdly rich that you can afford St. James, in Barbados.
As
well as gaining a tan and the admiration and envy of your friends, your exorbitant week on the beach will also gain for you an increased likelihood of skin cancer. The Tourist Board has done nothing to play this down.
It is really the nicest cancer you can possibly get, providing sympathy and drama but needing only the simplest treatment. In Darwin, Australia, the Skin Cancer Capital of the World, they use a smidgeon of local anaesthetic
and a sharp little spoon to cure it. It's a doddle.
As a fashionable woman who reads Vogue you will have observed that of those beautiful thin aristocratic models wearing beautiful thin expensive clothes about half,
nowadays, are darkish brown. So it's definitely snob to be sunburned, and snob, too, to be naturally pigmented, as long as you are thin and beautiful and possibly intelligent.
So I ask the Tourist Board to play up those
lovely brown models, play down the skin cancer (surely that imperceptible Sahara dust is a natural barrier to the ultraviolet) and never ever mention the money.
