We started the year in Jose Ignacio, in Uruguay. Many months before, we had agreed to spend the New Year holiday with our friends Knut & Leticia. We rented a big house together with other friends of K&L that we did not know. A few weeks before Christmas, K&L had second thoughts and dropped out, leaving us sharing a house with people we had never met before!
But it was OK, and we both totally loved the area and the lifestyle there. We even stayed on for some extra days to go house hunting. We did make an offer on a small house, but we're not sure if we’ll get it.
After that, I was contacted by my “new” daughter! My niece Abby, who lives in Australia, had taken the 23andMe DNA test and published her DNA to see if she matched with anyone, expecting maybe a distant cousin. She was not expecting to be contacted by a 40-year-old English woman who matched as a first cousin. This lady, called Amy Brewer, was born from a sperm donor in 1982 and had spent the last 5 years searching for her biological father. She asked Abby if it was possible that one of her uncles could have been a sperm donor in the early 80s.
When I was studying at the University of Sussex in the early 80s, a local Brighton clinic had advertised at the University for sperm donors. Six of us applied, and five were accepted! So, I wrote back to Abby and told her that it was almost certain that I was Amy’s biological father and to pass on my email address and invite her to contact me. Quite a few weeks passed before she finally did contact me. We shared some initial information, and I found out that she has a master's degree in Biochemistry from Oxford University and that she had taken a PGCE teaching certification at the University of Sussex (my alma mater). She lived in a small town called Cottenham, not far from Cambridge and she has 3 daughters, so I became an instant grandfather!
Next, she asked me if I would be willing to take a paternity test, which was easy to do, as many years ago, I had also taken the 23andMe DNA test. So very quickly, we were able to confirm that 50% of her DNA matches mine and that she is indeed my daughter. She then explained that her main objective in tracking me down was to find out about my health and the health history of my family so that her daughters would have an idea of what health risks they might face. Another benefit of 23andMe is that you can pay a small additional fee and get a full health report, detailing which DNA markers you might have. Happily, for everyone, I only have a couple of minor markers to worry about, and the rest is pretty positive, so I was able to pass that on. That was quite a few weeks ago now, and maybe that is enough for Amy, which would be fine for me too. I wondered if she would want to meet face-to-face at least once, but it's looking unlikely now. I always knew this was a possibility, and when I told my family about it, my sister was very nice in praising me for helping to bring joy to a family that otherwise would not have been able to have children.
After Uruguay, we returned to São Paulo. We sold our big city apartment and are renting an apartment for the first 6 months of the year. We share this with Carol’s children, Cesca, 27, and Bobby, 25. They will move into their own small apartments in the second half of the year, and we will also have a small apartment in the city and a big new house in a country condominium called Boa Vista. For the first few months of this year, we have been busy getting the new house up and running. It’s a nice big place with many bedrooms, a pool, BBQ, and there are 2 golf courses nearby and many tennis courts. They are even building a sandy beach by a lake which will have a wave machine for people to surf! But we will not be signing up for that!
Boa Vista is a 2-hour drive west from the centre of Sao Paulo:
Sao Paulo is located where the blue-dot is on the south east of Brazil:
While we focus on Boa Vista, we decided to rent out our Miami apartment for 6 months. We found a tenant very quickly, which meant that I had to dash over there and get all our belongings packed up and shipped off to a storage unit.
A couple of weeks ago, an old friend I used to play football with in Cambridge, Simon Billington, married a Brazilian woman in São Paulo. Quite a few of the players, current and retired, made the trip for the wedding, which was great fun. We even ended up playing a football match against a local Brazilian team that the bride’s ex-husband plays for. It was great fun, even if we did lose 7-3!
Today we are traveling back from Boa Vista to the city, and tomorrow we will go to a health spa called Spa Recanto, a couple of hours' drive from the city. We have both put on a lot of weight over the past year. I had a bad knee which stopped me from playing tennis for 6 months. I am happy to report that my knee is OK again now, but the extra 5 kg needs to go! So, it will be a 600-calorie diet for the next 2 weeks and a lot of exercise.
After that, we have a big wedding to attend in Lisbon, then I will be heading back to the UK in May for Rosie’s 19th birthday.
I think we will be around for a couple of months, then in August we plan to take my lovely old Jaguar on a ferry to northern Spain and then spend the best part of a month on a road trip around Spain, repeating the adventure we both really enjoyed around France last year.
That is my 2023 – Q1 news update.