Blast from the Past

I'd forgotten how much fun IRC can be. I used to use, well, first of all, Unix talkers, a long time ago - I was active on cut.pre.org & surfers & one or two others back in the mid-late '90s - but then that gave way to IRC which I'd do via an ssh link tunnelling out from my old job to a Unix box at Cambridge. It was useful - I didn't feel disconnected from my friends during the day & I had experts in every field of computing to draw upon if I encountered a sticky problem at work.

Shortly after I moved to Birmingham I pretty much gave up IRC for SL - I wasn't where most of my IRC mates lived any more & it was all a bit pointless anyway. But still, I remember the times I had, almost weeping with laughter at some of the antics that went on. Good times.

I popped into SL last night but I was too late to see the people I'd wanted to see, and the others I'd give time of day to were all a bit busy doing their own things, so I fired up the old Colloquy IRC client & logged in. It was good. I stayed up till about 2AM drinking wine & talking crap. Haven't had so much fun in ages, really.

I'm a bit angsty at the moment because I really want to claim my Irish nationality - I'm more than half Irish that I know of for sure, & both my paternal grandparents came from County Mayo. The trouble is, I'm told the records office in Castlebar burnt down in the '30s & the two old biddies they got to reconstruct it all from their memories of the local families forgot all about my Granddad! It's entirely possible that no proof exists, through no fault of mine or my family's, that my Grandparents ever came from Ireland, that the GRO would take as proof. My Granddad had a medal, FFS, from the first Taoiseach of Ireland, for services rendered during the war of independence & later the civil war. How many foreigners got such medals I wonder? I despair sometimes. It's going to mean I'll have to go over there & look for it in person, which could take bloody ages & loads of dosh. *shakes head sadly*

The worst of it is, a) it's hightlighting how little I know about my grandma, and b) her records may well have been burned too. I could effectively lose my right to claim the nationality that by blood I'm more entitled to than the one I have, because of two old biddies & a numpty with a candle in the 30's!