"Thanks for your responses to my question about whether White people describe other White people by skin complexion. I've never heard any White person use such descriptors."

There are multi-million pound industries built on the whiteness of white people's skin; every town in the UK has tanning booths and Boots is stacked with all sorts of gunk that turns people who think their skin is too white all hues.

I've been doing my family history and this has turned up one or two surprises that are making me reassess my own cultural identity. I had always considered myself a person of the Isles 100%. Although born and raised in England my mum is Welsh and there was a strong sense of 'Welshness' from the maternal side of the family. The Welshness was a stronger identity than the Englishness because it had more . . . substance. This is probably due to the personalities of my parents in part, but also because I think ordinary English people define their national identity in different ways; there is not a cohesive society-encompassing identifier of 'Englishness'.

During the course of my research I contacted a great Uncle on the paternal (or English) side I had never spoken to before: the last of my Nan's generation and a repository of family knowledge and rumour. He confirmed the possibility of French, Irish and Gypsy in the family which my Nan had told me years ago before she died. Interestingly, it turns out they were all musicians: singers, piano players, accordion players and in the case of my great-granddad, a mighty bones player (I have his set of cow ribs on my desk as I write this). Apparently they all loved to play music, sing and have an ale or six, so I know where I get that from . . .

Armed with some info on great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers I set about researching the census and BMD records. I traced one branch of the family back to the East End in the 1800's - real Billy Sykes types (they were pretty rum by all accounts). Turns out my great-great-great grandmother was a Huguenot, and the family has been traced back to Nimes in the south of France. They fled persecution in their homeland firstly to Prussia and ended up in the East End, probably following relatives and they all worked in the textile and wallpaper industries.

This came as a bit of a shock - the idea there was French in the family wasn't new but no-one realised just how close it was. Obviously my great-great grandfather felt this influence as he talked about it a fair bit.

I have discovered I am considerably less English than I thought I was. Indeed, a sizeable chuck of my make up isn't even from the Isles, but the south of France. I have no idea where the rest of my research will take me, but it is affecting my notions of who I am, and of my cultural inheritance, which is far wider than I could ever have imagined.