My family

Let me introduce myself. My name is Jackie. My full name is Jackie Rose. I am twenty-one and am in the 4^th year of the French and Russian department at Aberdeen University. I live on a farm in the North of Scotland in an area which attracts many tourists because of its beauty – the Scottish Highlands. It is a mountainous region with many lakes and can be very bleak in the winter. That is why the population is fairly small. Agriculture is the main occupation. My father is a farmer.

During the term-time I live in a university flat with five other girls and quite often go home at week-ends since it is only a hundred miles away.

My mother is a housewife and is always busy looking after the house – the garden and various animals. She is 50 and my father is 51. They both came from quite large families (my mother is one of six children and my father is one of four) so my two sisters, my brother and myself have many aunts, uncles and cousins. My mother’s parents are still alive, but we very rarely see them because they live on a small Scottish island quite far away.

My elder sister Margaret is almost twenty and works for my father in his office as a secretary. It is a well-paid job and she is very efficient but she does not really enjoy it because she works indoors all day. At heart she is a lover of outdoor life and would prefer to work with horses. Last year she trained to be a riding instructress but realized it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find a job and since she had already done a year’s secretarial course when she left school at 17, she decided to work for my father.

Jane, my other sister, is seventeen and in her final year at school. Up to the last year she went to a boarding school in Aberdeen but decided to come home and spend her last year in Inverness at the local comprehensive school because she has so many animals to look after. She owns two of our four cats, has two sheep and also keeps several ducks. As can be seen Jane is very interested in farming and she wants to study agriculture at the university next year. It is perhaps not a very wise choice, since it is extremely difficult for girls to find jobs as farm managers.

The youngest member of the family is William, who is 16. He is at a boarding school near Perth, about 150 miles away and comes home once a term and at holidays. Choosing a career is no problem for him – he has always wanted to be a farmer and to take over business from my father. He is tall and strong for his age and works on the farm every holiday.

As can be seen, all my family (except for me) is very involved in farming. It isn’t surprising since both my father’s father and my mother’s father and their fathers before them were also farmers ­– it is a family tradition. Our family is slightly larger than average (apparently the average number of children in British families is 2). But since the age difference between the children is small we all get on very well with each other and with our parents. All in all, we’re a very happy family.