Cussedness
The natural cussedness of things in general.
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Four Generations of Ryans
It turns out that Wilfred is the first Ryan great-grandson with the Ryan surname, meaning that he’s the first-born son of the first-born son of my granddad’s first-born son. If my granddad was king of somewhere that practised agnatic primogeniture, this picture would show the direct line of inheritance. Wilf isn’t the first great-grandchild for my grandparents, though, not by a decade at least, so they were politely interested in him, no more. My dad’s family is rather large, so I imagine that the novelty wore off ages ago; he’s probably about the ninetieth descendent, I don’t know exactly.
One thing I have noticed from this photo is that all the Ryan men have wonky eyes, but whilst Wilf, me and my dad have our right eyes slightly higher than our left, my granddad seems to be the other way round. I really didn’t expect eye-alignment to be genetic, and assumed that my eyes were off-plumb because I got dropped on my head as a baby or something (a theory that also explains several other things), but apparently it’s a heritable characteristic. Gosh.
