What was found in the gaming wreckage.

I watched gaming swallow years of my son’s life, but more than 20 years after I carried this little Russian boy through Novgorod on my shoulders, something good came out of it.

I first met my future son in late 2003. I won’t call him my stepson. I have never liked the word. Stepson seems to arrive carrying centuries of rather dreadful public relations.

Grimm’s fairy tales did it no favours: wicked stepmothers, unwanted children, families divided into the authentic and the inferior. Even now the word can suggest a relationship …