I do not consider myself to be a man of mystery. I do not understand why people choose to shroud their pasts and their true selves from their friends, family, and colleagues. Telling others of who you are is the first step to making them truly understand you. It's what you do after that which truly defines you.

Recently my mind has been abuzz with the thought of this. The thought of ancestry, and of those who walked before us, in order to lay down the foundation of our present, and the future of the world. I suppose that is why I'm choosing now to truly begin the chronology of my life. But as fascinating as ancestors are, the line of ancestry, and the intricate webs of our past, I have the unfortunate displeasure of knowing nothing older than my own two parents.

My parents were a very mixed-match, and I too turned our to be rather different from them two to begin with, if you consider personality rather than looks or physique. I have since likened it to something like an American situation-comedy, if only I had any siblings, or if they had even more varying traits and personalities than either me or my parents.

My mother was a biologist, and the reason I am legally classified as an Anglo-French, rather than just an Englishman. My father, on the other hand, was a boxing manager. What some might consider a strange job for an Englishman like he, but he always had a passion for that certain genre of fighting, a passion of which he never felt like he could do himself, so instead he managed young and aspiring athletes. As their jobs might give you the impression, they were individually rather rich, garnering plenty of money to sustain a very lavish lifestyle, as you would expect.

Their paths crossed when my father was coaching a certain young hopeful around the country of France, in a specific tournament created to help numerous young athletes adjust to competition fighting. Meanwhile, my mother wanted a little bit of extra cash to keep afloat after an accident with taxes, and to get that, she was using her training to help nurse those in said boxing tournament. On a stop in Marseille, the kid had gotten pretty beaten up in a fight, but had actually managed to walk away with a victory. He was taken to a medical staff, which had also consisted of my mother. As you might have guessed, she and my father had met and through this, they had gotten together.

Not too long afterward, they had gotten married. Together they moved to the French port city of Calais, which I would soon come to call: My hometown.