I have received excellent news with regard to my Odyssey In Search of David Mitchell. Apparently, he's been on Who Do You Think You Are, http://bit.ly/TvsR3 and has found out that his antecedents were... drum roll... sheep farmers. In Scotland. Hurrah! He is thus as thoroughly down to earth as I assumed he was. Hopefully this means that the manipulative producers of the show will not have managed to make him cry (impoverished sheep farmers - not that tragic?), which seems largely to be their aim each episode. Sometimes I wonder if they choose celebs for WDYTYA purely on the strength of whether people want to see them cry or not (Jeremy Paxman, Chris Moyles - it's a shame Margaret Thatcher's too far gone; she'd be ideal).

The exciting thing from David's point of view, is that, if he were to marry me, he could automatically raise the Mitchell clan several rungs up the society ladder because my antecedents include... drum roll... Joan of Arc. Joan of bloody Arc! I know - seems like the kind of thing that would come out of regression therapy, but I've seen the family tree with my own eyes - in the very dim and distant past, my family dates back to Joanie d's brother. It's long been a nugget of crazy family lore, which we often bring out to amuse and astound, but I was never quite sure if I believed it. However, when I was at home about a year ago, we dug through the giant desk that resides in the corner of the posh sitting room (my parents' house contains both a 'TV room' and a 'drawing room') which is the filing cabinet for all Important Family Paperwork. And there it was, as if by magic. Well, unless someone in the family nicked it a couple of generations back, from a visiting French dignitary, when they were impoverished potato farmers in Ireland.