Esther's 10th birthday

Esther turned 10 today. I know, I know. I don't look old enough, or at the very least I don't act mature enough.

There are a couple of things to remark upon about this picture.

Handsome picture though it is, I can't take credit for it. This is all Julia's work. Reason for that - apart from Julia having a certain natural aptitude at snapping - is that I was absent for the cutting of my eldest daughter's birthday cake. Which leads us to the second problem with the photo. It's taken in front of our bookcase, in our living room, in our house in the Netherlands. It's NOT taken while sipping a glass of lightly chilled pinot noir next o my mum's swimming pool in the south of France. Which leads on to where I was. I was sitting in a humid little room all day waiting for Radovan Karadzic to be handed over to the U.N. war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. It's now 11 p.m. and there's still no sign of him. I've now been waiting exactly a week. Our holiday was due to start on Saturday with a leisurely drive to the holiday home of my brother Rob and his family in Burgundy followed by another leisurely trundle down to my mum's house.

Instead, we're all still here waiting for Radovan. 

I won't make any war crimes gags because delaying our holiday by five days isn't quite an atrocity of the magnitude of, say, launching a 44-month shelling/sniping campaign on Sarajevo that left 10,000 people dead and the city in ruins. But still, I'd really like to be on holiday right now.

As usual, Irmie uncomplainingly picked up the parenting slack and took the girls to the local park with scary rides where she sat on park benches feeling queazy just watching Esther and Julia flying around rollercoasters etc. At the end of the day, Irmie brought the girls out to Scheveningen for dinner at a restaurant on the beach. This was conveniently just a minute by motorbike from the detention unit where, one of these days, Karadzic is due to take up residence and start playing pingpong with Croats he (allegedly) used to try to kill in pursuit of a Greater Serbia.