Dialogue: March of science brings choices

By ROANNE PARKER

Until recently an old adage ran true for most of us: you can't pick your family.

We enjoy a relatively caste-free society, so we are not classified by our birthright, or lack of it.

But we are lucky in having, or not lucky in not having, childless great-aunts with millions to bequeath to us, parents with a beach-front holiday house they never use, and uncles who are high in the echelons of the New Zealand Rugby Football Union, with spare tickets to all the right games.

The cloning thing turns that on its head, with the news that you can, in fact, pick your family - right down to the last perky chromosome.

There is a lot of sense in this. Who wants to be born to a drug-riddled mother or a downright ugly father? Hey presto, they are excluded from the gene pool. Bugger their human rights - they have been naturally deselected. Leave them on the bench.

Regardless of the fact that it would be tricky to be born into the perfect family retrospectively, the imagination can get stuck into this one.

I have been galvanised into giving the situation some serious consideration. If you can pick your family, who do you pick?

I suppose the most cliched request would be a takeaway order of health, wealth, beauty, brains and power. Not a bad start. But this is for life, our one and only shot at it.

I would begin with the request that no matter what, there has to be someone in the whanau who works for a major international airline and who will get me 10 per cent airfares ad infinitum and keep my duty-free cosmetics and vodka well stocked.

And my parents will own a house on the Cheltenham Beach front, where I get to grow up.

It's tempting to request to be an only child to maximise any inheritance but the more siblings I order up, the more potential I have there, so let's go for an entrepreneurial brother with a corporate box at all major sporting events. A sister who is a doctor, a lawyer and an accountant, for prescriptions, precedents and penny-watching. Another sister who runs a hideaway in Fiji, and perhaps another brother who is managing Huka Lodge. There, that's five of us.

Of course, all siblings need to have lovely partners and great children so we get to have wonderful Christmases together with lots of laughter and squabbling.

The parents would live on the beach, and be fulfilled, busy, happy, kind and willing to take grandchildren at a moment's notice. They will know the names of all the trees and flowers to teach my children, along with how to construct a strawberry sponge cake and a tree-house.

What a journey of self-discovery this is. Apart from a few salient points, my real-life family is not so far removed from my dream one. If you take out the allusions to wealth and cushy jobs, travel, freebies and babysitting, you are left with my family - happy, healthy, squabbling, Christmas, all of the buzz words are there.

That's very nice, but I think I am going to use this "choose your perfect family" scenario as a conversation starter for a while, because it would work brilliantly as a dinner-party test to find out how shallow my friends are.

If you can pick your family, you can pick your star sign, and I am going to stick with Sagittarius. I am perfectly happy being idealistic, outgoing, fun-loving and direct.

If it weren't for the fact that I am predisposed to seeking to know and understand the truths of the universe, I would not be writing a column.

And it's primo to be able to blame my outrageous lack of tact on the stars rather than assume any responsibility for the occasions when I drop a clanger.

There's nothing I am better at. Take the time I ran into a casual acquaintance who I knew was pregnant, looked down at her big tummy and cheerfully asked when she was due, it must be soon, to be tearfully informed that the babe was three months old. Oops. You need to have experienced the horror of the post-birth tummy to appreciate how bad that one was.

Perhaps a slight technical hitch should be noted: would anyone in his or her right mind elect to bring a person like me into the world?

It might be best to stick to the old-fashioned birthing methods.

After all, you can't pick your family - and now they've got me, they can't get rid of me either.