Today, as I was growing up, our family would celebrate my late Dad’s birthday. And even though he passed on seventeen years ago at the age of eighty eight - almost 89 - I do remember him and my mother every now and then. Relationships between parents and children are complicated, because they involve both love and discipline, with everything in between as well at the teaching of behaviour and identity.

As I look at my own life, I realise at seventy seven, that much of the way I have conducted my life was footed on the foundation that my parents laid for me when I was young and an often reluctant pupil.

Family upbringing carries with it the affect and effect for a life time. This goes under appreciated in our institutionalised societal structure with its worship of scientific knowledge. It over looks and lacks the emotive and feeling value aspects of human relationships, by avoiding so called personal involvements. Cold comfort that is and not affective.

Yesterday I finalised my changed trip dates, which cost me an additional 400$$. However, in spite of this extra expense, it still feels like the right move. I also picked up a little book that is the translated transcript [Penguin] of Marco Polo’s account of his "Travels in the land of Kublai Khan", the greatest of the Mongol rulers. We always hear about these accounts, but now I am reading them as recorded during Polo’s lifetime of 1254-1324.

There is still some controversy as to whether Polo actually made all these trips himself, since he does not mention Tashkent, which at that time was a major center of culture and commerce. Just like New York now and Amsterdam in 1650, Venice then, was the hub of many travelers and tales at Polo’s time. However that may be, the accounts are probably close to some truth. Just the account of the big ‘snakes’ on the last few pages - 93 to 95 - by itself is fascinating, as the snake’s description suggests ‘crocodile’!