corders in the hague

The Swamp

2010-03-22T05:21:00.001-07:00

Trampoline.

Before drainage:After - or at least halfway to - drainage.

We have been hard at work at the new garden. First we bought lots of mud to fill in an unsightly trench and today we spent the day digging it all up again to lay down drainage pipes.

The permafrost of this year's winter has finally thawed and last night it rained REALLY hard. So today as we arrived at the garden it looked ok, but when Irmie stepped off the path she immediately sank up to her knees into the mud.

We realized that we are going to have to heed the advice of our neighbor and install drainage or the new trampoline we bought for the girls will disappear underground within a couple of days.

So we spent today digging trenches that run downhill into the stream behind the garden. Let's just say: easier said than done and leave it at that.

At the end of the day we rebuilt the growing box that had dominated the left side of the garden. We thought it was too big so we sawed it in half and rebuilt it in a less obtrusive spot close to the hut. It has glass panels over it so we should be planting seeds in there sometime soon and before too long we'll be enjoying our first harvest.

Washing machine anchor.

2010-03-22T04:26:00.000-07:00

Julia shows off our new technique for stopping the washing machine dancing around the attic. Just attach child. Easy.

Hockey vs. hockey

2010-02-20T17:17:00.000-08:00

Here's a blog I wrote for AP a couple of days ago.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia _ I play hockey (the field variety) and I sometimes _ when the canals where I live in Holland freeze over _ go skating. But do both at once? Forget it.
Before moving to Holland, I'd lived, in no particular order, in Australia, Hong Kong and Britain _ none of them exactly ice hockey powerhouses, so even though I'm a huge sports fan hockey has always been a bit of a mystery to me.
Sure, I've watched it on TV, but only during the face painting episode from the sixth series of "Seinfeld."
So taking in an Olympic hockey match was very high on my list of stuff to do here in Vancouver.
I finally got the chance today and went to watch the United States against Norway.
The first thing that struck me on taking my seat at Canada Hockey Place and reading the team sheet was how many American players are called Ryan. Is it obligatory?
Watching hockey when you're used to the game played on green artificial turf is tough. You never quite know where the puck is going next and which part of a player's body or equipment is going to be used to hit or control it. I saw hands, legs, boots. American goalie Ryan Miller even saved one shot with his head.
In my version of the game, you hit the ball with the front of your stick and a penalty gets called if the ball touches your foot or hand. Also, there are no boards _ the ball goes out of play all the time. At Canada Place, the puck only spiralled into the crowd three times that I counted (and in my genteel sport the fans would toss the ball back, not hold it up for the cameras and then pocket it).
As the game got underway, I was amazed by the agility and speed of not only the players _ but also the officials and the crew that dashes onto the rink to scrape up ice shavings every few minutes. Do they take that stuff up to the skyboxes to put in corporate margaritas?
The guys in the black and white striped shirts were unbelievably quick when they thought a fracas was about to break out. There was a disappointing (to me, at any rate) lack of fighting. I fully expected to see at least one bench-clearing brawl, but apart from a few minor skirmishes the whole game was as good natured as a sport invovling slamming one another into a plexiglass wall could be.
The match itself was over incredibly quickly. I'm used to American sports taking forever because of all the timeouts. There's none of that in hockey. I was amazed to see a couple of Norwegians skate off the ice after only 20 seconds of the first period. Surely they can't be tired yet, I thought. But I guess they were being swapped because there was a face off (which my version of hockey would call a bully off) and the coach wanted to bring on a couple more defenders.
In football (soccer), the sport I watch the most, substituted players amble off, touch the grass and cross themselves, blow a couple of kisses to their (or maybe somebody else's) wife in the stands and exchange high fives with the player replacing them. The whole process can take a couple of minutes.
Against all odds an American not called Ryan _ the stats sheet tells me it was Phil Kessel _ opened the scoring and the Americans added two more before their opponents unexpectedly hit back.
Maybe realizing that playing six against six on the ice wasn't working for them, the Norwegians had Tore Vikingstad sent off. The tactic paid off almost immediately as Marius Holtet broke away to score and make it 3-1. They nearly scored a second a few seconds later.
The Americans tried the tactic by having a player sin binned early in the third period, but they couldn't manage to turn their numerical disadvantage into a goal. Instead they scored a few more goals against the fading Norwegians with the right number of players on the ice. Final score: 6-1.
I headed happily out of the stadium still dizzy at the skill of the players and my ears ringing from hockey's signature sound _ the crash of fully-grown men against the boards.
My first live hockey match will defintely not be my last.

Tuesday in pix

2010-02-09T23:45:00.000-08:00

My day in pictures. Back to front, but I can't work out how to put them in chronological order. Basically Tuesday was like this: First thing in the morning take a bus from media center to the Richmond Oval, venue for speedskating. Gorgeous building and nice looking schaatsbaan. From there to the Olympic doping laboratory. File story on doping from the bus back to media center. A bus with wifi. Quick salad for lunch - the only thing I've eaten here apart from an apple that was not deep fried _ and then onto another bus up to Cypress Mountain to check out moguls training and see how the course was looking. Not bad considering they have lugged most of the snow there by truck or helicopter. I had the slightly surreal experience of seeing the same kind of helicopter they use to battle bushfires in Australia used here to dump snow on the slopes.

View from my office

2010-02-09T23:28:00.000-08:00

Vancouver on the other side of the harbour from the Olympic media center. This is the view if I step out of the AP office. It's almost worth taking up smoking so you can go outside for a cigarette in the open air and look at this.

Vancouver-bound

2010-02-08T07:31:00.000-08:00

Message to ESPN: Playing computer games in not sport.

En route to Vancouver I had to stop off in Chicago for a couple of hours. I dreaded it, as I thought I wouldn't have enough time to get my bags, clear immigration, recheck my bags, take a train across the airport, check in again and get to the gate. As it turns out, it was an incredibly efficient process that I breezed through in a matter of minutes.

That left me more than an hour to kill, so I did what most Americans appeared to be doing with their spare time _ I watched sport on TV and drank weak beer.

I was flattered to be asked for ID to prove I was over 21. I didn't realize that was even necessary for a glass of Bud Light, which I think has roughly the same alcohol content as a Coke Lite.

I then sat at the bar with a bunch of other blokes, feeling a little embarrased I'd left my baseball cap at home, watching America's premium sporting channel - ESPN.

As I ordered my beer there was a college basketball match on the box, but as soon as I sat down they switched to cover 10-pin bowling. I didn't really pay much attention after the first minute, as it just looked like a parade of strikes and _ much as I love sport on TV _ this got to be a bit like watching paint drying, grass growing etc.

So I was pleased when the next show came on and appeared to be what I had actually sat down for in the first place _ the Super Bowl between the Indianapolis Colts and New Orleans Saints. But no, it actually turned out to be coverage of people playing an American Football video game. I have to say it was a pretty cool looking game, but a game it remained.

Fortunately, my plane to Vancouver was on time and I left the kids to their consoles.

I had got myself a window seat at the back and was pleased I had because the view was amazing as we headed west more or less (I think) along or just south of the US-Canada border. Snow-covered fields gave way to what I suppose were the Rockies, all bathed in a late afternoon glow as the sun set. It sure beat watching bowling.

I am about to go out in the light in Vancouver for the first time, so I can't really give an opinion of the city. I got a chance to have a good look around in the dark last night as the bus driver who ferried me and two other journalists from the airport downtown (the four of us in a 60-seater bus - so much for Vancouver trumpeting these as the Green Games) got hopelessly lost. I'm not sure how long the trip should take, but we did it in more than an hour. The driver was incredibly nice and apologetic about the whole thing. He blamed a local organizer for incorrectly programming his TomTom. As with most Olympics, organizers here can't get enough local drivers for all the cars and buses needed to ferry around athletes and press. So this bloke drove two days from South Dakota to spend his holidays driving a bus here. Admirable, but it does lead to a certain lack of familiarity with the road network. There are always stories about these kinds of glitches in the days running up to the opening ceremony, but mostly they fade away as the sports get busier and the out-of-town drivers get a bit more local knowledge.

So in the absence of other images, I'll show you the delightful view from my hotel before I wander down to the harbor foreshore, which I'm hoping will be a bit more picturesque.

The Smiley Restaurant in the bottom left corner may become my regular morning haunt - they advertise a breakfast that includes a steak omelette.

Folk Garden

2010-02-05T06:33:00.000-08:00

So this is the new project.

Given my profound dislike of gardening, tending a large allotment on which we plan to grow our own organic fruit and veggies may not seem the most obvious choice.

But I'm actually quite interested to see how it all turns out.

The plot is 260-odd square meters and until last week belonged to an elderly gentleman who has - let's put this politely - neglected the place a bit in the last few years.

Putting it charitably again, I like to think he's left us a blank canvas. It looks like a scene from The Road. I don't think anything has grown there in years. First job is to dig up everything, plough compost into it and then lay drainage pipes to dry it out a bit - there's a little canal running along the back border behind the house so the plan is to drain water into that.

I think the majority of the space will then be taken up by low-maintenance lawn - the girls want to put a trampoline on it and I'm looking for a place to string up a hammock and set up a barbie.

We officially take possession in a couple of weeks, when I'm in Vancouver for the Winter Olympics. Irmie and the girls are planning to have a go at cleaning up the little hut and maybe the greenhouse while I'm away and to leave the backbreaking spadework to me when I get back.

It looks idyllic covered in snow, but Irmie says it seems a bit more daunting now the snow has melted. Now it looks like a soggy stretch

of World War I no-man's-land.

The little hut, meanwhile, is gorgeous as you can see. No power or mains water, but we collect rain water and there's a little tap operated by a foot pump. There's a two-burner gas-fired stove, but we're not sure it'll still be there once the former owner's stuff is cleared out. I'm hoping he'll just leave everything there as there are a couple of handsome pairs of wooden clogs I have my eye on. We're mulling putting a solar panel on the roof to power a laptop so I can work there while Irmie's harvesting runner beans.

The allotment is part of a complex of Volkstuinen - Folk Gardens in English - which also features a little cafe and store for buying gardening stuff.

I will keep you posted when I get back and launch my horticultural career.

DIY

2010-01-17T12:30:00.000-08:00

It's been a while, again.

So what's happened since we got back from Australia? A load of normal stuff, really.

Our family has expanded again. At Sinterklaas, Julia became the proud parent and primary (or at least secondary) carer of a dwarf hamster. In line with our Australian-tinted pet naming policy, it was dubbed Possum.

All was well with possum until a brutal cold snap hit the Netherlands just before Christmas. Irmie and I were talking in the kitchen when we heard Julia screaming and running down the stairs.

Nothing new in that, of course. Julia - along with Esther - spends half her life screaming and stomping up or down the stairs. But this was a scream that immediately signaled to us that the cause wasn't a run-of-the-mill sibling scrap.

Julia ran into the kitchen clutching something small and stiff in her hand.

Possum was no more - or at least that was what it looked like; the little critter was flat and stiff as a mini ironing board. If we'd had two hamsters meet the same fate simultaneously, we could have played ping pong with them. Possum was beyond rigor mortis and it's little black eyes were trying to pop out of its flattened head. It was cold. It's cage had spent the night in the -10 cold of the attic playroom. I wouldn't have been surprised to see little icicles dangling from the bars of its cage.

I suggested to Julia that she might want to take a quiet moment cuddling and taking leave of the week-old love of her life. She was having nothing of it, saying she was going to nurse it back to life.

Who was I to deprive her of some quality caring time with the soon to be ex-hamster? My woolen hat was warming on the radiator, so I gave it to Julia and she placed Possum inside. She almost had to fold the hamster in the middle to get its stiff little body in. I could see a faint pulse in its neck, but was convinced Possum's tiny heart was pumping its last.

Unbelievably, as Julia continued to cuddle her (or him, for who knows what gender it is) Possum started to puff out a bit. Long story short, five minutes later she/he was hurtling aimlessly around its exercise wheel with no apparent ill effects from the near death experience. The upshot of this all is that Possum now lives in its cage on the dining table, which I think is disgusting - who wants to eat with a rat looking at you? I've been a student, I've done that.

As I mentioned, it's been cold. Today was the first time the temperature has resolutely stayed above freezing since Possum's flirtation with death. Ice and snow are great fun here in the Netherlands, except that the girls grab their sled at the first sight of a snow flake and that means dragging duties for me. In my youth, you pulled your sled to a hill, slid down it, pulled it back up the slope and repeated the process until frost bite started depriving you of toes. Not here in the land of no hills.

Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to warming up from this Dutch deep freeze by going to Vancouver for the Winter Olympics. With an impending absence of nearly a month, I've been looking around the house for stuff that needs doing. Irmie even commented on my new enthusiasm for DIY activities. She was impressed that I changed a light bulb without her asking me. I should say that in the last year, Irmie has painted all the window frames in the house and the ceilings downstairs (twice), as well as applying some kind of sealant to my office balcony to prevent a further leak that would have meant a third go at painting the ceilings.

Nevertheless, emboldened by Irmie's praise, I decided yesterday to unblock the bathroom sink, which was taking an hour to drain each time I shaved, presumably because of a wad of hair in the u-bend. Simple, I thought. Just take out the u-bend, poke a pipe cleaner through it and screw it back into place. What could possibly go wrong?

I moved the cupboard obscuring the pipes under the sink and tried twisting the things holding the u-pipe in place. My DIY knowledge doesn't extend to knowing what they are. Whatever they're called, they didn't budge. I scraped around in my shoe-box-sized tool kit and located some kind of a wrench. I managed to get a firm grip on the pipe and twisted. The thing holding the u-pipe didn't budge, but the pipe itself did and immediately cracked and spat a pint of water and a fur ball of Irmie, Esther and Julia hair onto the floor and my trousers. Not the effect I'd been hoping for.

It wasn't all bad, though. My first instinct in such situations is that fixing what I have just destroyed is beyond me. I break stuff. I don't mend it. So this was the excuse I've been looking for for months to get a plumber to install a whole new bathroom. Possibly not the cheapest solution, but the best in the long run, I felt.

Irmie played along skillfully and tagged along to the DIY store this morning to pick out a new bathroom. She feigned interest in a couple of expensive sink-cupboard combos I was enthusiastic about before wandering over to the aisle she'd been looking for all along - plumbing supplies.

I was going to have to at least try fixing the mess I'd made with a 10 euro piece of pipe before she would agree to spending thousands on a new bathroom. Feeling a fool for having been duped so easily, I sheepishly bought a fancy new u-bend - so fancy, that it was not shaped like a u at all. I took it home and whacked one end into a hole in the wall only to find that it didn't come even close to lining up with the down pipe sticking out of the hole in the bottom of the sink. Even I realized I was not going to be able to bend the pipes to make them fit together, so I disassembled the thing, tried to polish away the scratches and stuffed it back into its packaging. The 15-year-old girl at the DIY store's service desk looked at me disdainfully and gave me my money back.

I decided to take one more look at the plumbing parts and found a good old-school u-bend assembly that you could, with a minimum of bending metal out of shape, swivel at two different points - meaning you could move it laterally to position it under the hole in the bottom of the sink. And indeed, even I managed to make it fit. So now - somehow - I've managed to earn credit with Irmie for unnecessarily depriving her of a place to brush her teeth for most of the weekend. She must be looking forward to my trip to Vancouver almost as much as I am.

Corders back in Sydney

2009-08-10T04:09:00.000-07:00

We've been back in Australia for just over two weeks. I came with a list of stuff to do and see that included the usual tourist icons but also things like buying a carton of beer and bag of ice from a drive-thru bottle shop, watching a game of rugby league on television on a Friday night and eating a bowl of chicken laksa. With a week to go, I've already done most of them and keep adding stuff to the list.
One thing that wasn't on the list was running down one of Australia's 1,200 surviving cassowaries.
The cassowary is a giant and savage flightless bird - a kind of psychadelic emu. It has a spectacularly blue and red colored neck and head and appears to wear a roman legionnaire's helmet at all times to help it crash through the dense undergrowth of the rain forests of northeastern Australia. If they feel threatened by a hapless tourist, they can leap in the air and carve open the person's chest using their huge toe nails.
Despite the helmet/claw arsenal, they are very shy birds and it is pretty rare to spot one - loss of habitat and speeding drivers are taking a heavy toll.
So imagine my delight when I saw one at the side of a road in Cape Tribulation and then my horror when the damn thing made like a lemming and dived towards the rear wheels of our hire car. I managed to avoid it and glanced in my rear view mirror to see it swerve out of the way of the car following us and back into the relative safety of the forest.
I also saw a stingray flapping over the seabed of the Great Barrier Reef but wasn't able to ascertain if it was the same one that did for Steve Irwin.
All four of us set off for the reef last week on a tropical northern Queensland winter's day that started warm and calm and degenerated fast. By the time we got to the catamaran anchored in the relative calm of Cape Tribulation bay there was a fair wind blowing and a strong swell charging south-to-north up the coast.
I may have mentioned in the past that Irmie is not a great sailor (or flyer or car/bus passenger) and she lasted exactly five minutes before throwing up and getting ferried back to shore before we actually weighed anchor.
As it turns out, she did the right thing. We endured a shocking trip to the reef and a far worse one back. It was too rough to sit outside and stare at the horizon so we were stuck in the cabin looking out of the windows at a view that alternated between sky and sea as the boat pitched or rolled or did both simultaneously.
While actually out at the coral, the boat was moored behind the reef and was very stable. I snorkelled over beautiful coral and fish with Esther and Julia and that made the horrors of the boat trip worthwhile. Back on land, Irmie enjoyed herself wandering through rainforests and mangroves that remained mercifully anchored to dry land.
Apart from our trip north, we have spent our time visiting old friends in Sydney and loved every minute of it. Julia visited her old school today and gave a talk to the entire year four which was a test of her rusty English but went well.
Sydney has put on a very enticing show for us - it's been hovering around 20 degrees and sunny every day so far in the deepest of its deep midwinter and all our old mates have greeted us like ... long lost friends.
I've eaten in pubs, drunk pinot noir in Paddington, pinicked and played crickets nest to Sydney Harbour, lounged around drinking beer while watching kangaroos lounge around near the Hawkesbury River north of Sydney and just missed one of the roos with a low five iron shot onto a green on a golf course hugging the river's western bank.
A few more days then we're heading to Hong Kong and then back to NL to resume wondering why we left this place in the first place and maybe post a few of the 10 million pix I've taken.

2009-05-14T12:57:00.000-07:00

I fell off the blogging horse in February and the longer I stayed down, the harder it got to get back in the saddle.

The process wasn't helped by discovering twitter. If you're really interested, you can follow my inane 140-character ramblings there.

The girls have grown up some more in the meantime. So much so that the nudge I finally needed to sit down and write an update was making humus for Irmie's 40th birthday party on Saturday. I will do almost anything to avoid dealing with chick peas.

So what's happened in the time since I last wrote?

Mostly the usual stuff.

First the big deal: Irmie started her own OT practice.

Go to www.ergotherapievoorburg.nl to read all about it (assuming you read Dutch).

It's going very well so far. Irmie's basically been doing it a month and is already getting new clients (I'm apparently not allowed to call them patients) referred to her every week. She's still doing her part-time job in Delft while she builds up contacts among doctors etc who can send her more patients.

While Irmie has been hard at work doing securing our future for when twitter makes all traditional journalism redundant, I've taught myself to open one beer bottle by using another beer bottle.

The girls are at school, learning stuff with varying degrees of success and are still swimming and playing hockey every waking moment. They now ride to school on their own in the mornings once I've taken them across the busy road at the end of our street.

Other stuff briefly:

We got new windows in our house.

Our fence blew down and I (well, Irmie really) had to erect a new one. Our neighbour was supposed to do it with me, but he showed even less enthusiasm for the project than me.

Our television blew up.

I bought a very handsome new bicycle courtesy of a tax windfall.

A week after buying the bike, the tax office said (incorrectly, I hope) I owed them 6,000 euros.

Esther's hockey team, coached by me and another parent, beat a team 1-0, after having lost 12-0 to the same team earlier this season. I nearly wept with joy. Our victory was made all the sweeter by the parents of the losing team moaning afterwards that their best player was sick etc, etc. How they managed to not be happy for my girls - who had just won their second match of the season - is a mystery to me.

We've booked out tickets to Australia and Hong Kong this summer. I'm compiling a list of stuff I'm looking forward to (this is a small sampling and is in no particular order of preferene, but you can be sure I will tick all of these boxes):

Seeing gum trees wave their branches in the wind.

Listening to magpies and kookaburras.

Eating meat pies with Esther and Julia.

Watching rugby league on Channel 9.

Cooking large steaks on free public barbies.

Driving over the harbour bridge.

Laksa.

Eating fish and chips washed down with cold beer next to the beach at Dee Why and Balmoral.

A whole load of other stuff happened too since I last updated, but it's all too long ago now so I won't try to play catch up. Hopefully, now I've started again I'll post stuff a little more regularly/frequently than so far this year.

Arm Update

2009-02-16T00:56:00.003-08:00

I know you have all been fretting about my injured arm. Well fret no more. According to my last X-ray, the bit of bone that broke off has fused back on in the right place. A doctor told me this means they don't have to screw it back on - now they tell me - but more importantly it means I can now start exercising the arm again.
This in turn means that I can now lift my left arm away from my body which means I can (A) wash under it and (B) apply deoderant. Everybody close to me seems very happy about the last two steps.

Ironic footnote

2009-01-21T04:41:00.000-08:00

I didn't mention it in the original post about my little mishap, but I enjoy the irony so much that I do so here: The company I was playing for Monday night is called Arbodienst: A service which, its own website says, and I quote: "works together with employers and employees to improve the health, availability and productivity of your staff."

Broke

2009-01-20T11:38:00.000-08:00

I don't want to sound ungrateful for my quality time with mum last week, but after a week sitting next to her in the Montpellier hospital I'd had a bellyfull of hospitals.
So imagine how delighted I was to find myself in the A&E department of our local hospital this morning with my arm in a sling.
It started with a call from my friend Bert asking if I could play hockey Monday night. His team was short-handed and anybody who knew which end of the stick to hold would be fine.
I was just back from France and had a stiff neck from sitting in the uncomfortable chair next to mum, but when duty and a good friend call...
So imagine my surprise when just one minute into the match I found myself upside down in midair looking down (through the heavy, freezing rain) at the astroturf where I was about to land heavily and wondering who could possibly have slammed me so hard from behind. You guessed it: Bert. Like all the best goalkeepers he likes to stamp his authority on the opposing striker early in the match.
I applaud this, but not when I am standing between him and the aforementioned striker. The target of Bert's charge limped away with blood pouring out of a gash in his knee while I picked myself and then my arm off the turf. It felt like my arm had popped out of its socket and straight back in.
As usual, I decided that the only course of action was to run it off, so I finished the match despite the fact that I couldn't actually hit the ball without dropping my stick in agony.
So that's how we ended up in another damn hospital this morning. A quick X-ray showed that Bert, sorry I, had chipped a chunk off the top of my arm bone. The bit of bone appears to be more or less where it is supposed to and in a place where putting my arm in plaster won't work. So I have a sling and the same painkillers mum is popping by the fistful at the moment and am hoping the bone chip doesn't drift off into another part of my body.

Montpelligay

2009-01-14T12:32:00.001-08:00

How did this happen?
I’m sitting in a gay bar in Montpellier typing fast and wondering if patting the owner’s dog is tantamount to an invitation to take me roughly from behind.
I saw a sign advertising free wifi (pronounced weefee here in France) and just barged in. Only when I sat down and had already ordered a beer did I notice that they are playing disco music and there are flags made up of horizontal bars of all the colours of the rainbow hanging above all doors and windows. Now I look around me, there’s also a large painting hanging on one wall of a muscled man in a black singlet with well-coiffed hair and a moustache.
I think I’ll leave the dog alone. Who knows what the etiquette is in these establishments? I feel like a homophobe just for wondering about the dog. I mean, just because it’s a gay bar, doesn’t mean it’s a pickup joint, does it? Straight bars aren’t all pickup joints, are they?
When did I get so out of touch? And how do I keep that little poodle from sniffing at my crotch?
For those of you who don’t know, I’m in Montpellier looking after my mum as she recovers from having a new aortic heart valve surgically inserted last Friday. Apparently hers was bad from birth but doctors waited until she was 60+ before deciding maybe they should do something about it.
The new valve is made from a pig. I think I ate the remainder of the animal tonight mashed up with pepper corns and a bunch of other stuff into a very excellent terrie du maison.
What happens if I kick the stinking little mutt? It’s not sniffing anybody else.
My only previous experience in Montpellier was at the Rugby World Cup last year and then I was with two drunken photographers so I didn’t get to see much of the city – just a bad restaurant and an Irish bar. What is it with photographers and Irish bars? Still, at least they don’t generally take you to gay bars.
Turns out Montpellier is a beautiful old city with a university dating, the guide book tells me, back to the 13th century. What on earth did people learn at universities in the 13th century? How to detect a witch?
I’ve spent most of my time in the hospital watching mum lie there in pain and thinking that her days as a topless model are probably now definitively behind her. The wound where they cracked open her chest to get to her heart is not small.
All is well with mum, who should be allowed home next week after I’ve returned home and been replaced on Florence Nightingale duty by my elder sister.
It’s odd to be looking after mum (if doing the Times crossword with her counts as looking after) after all the years of her looking after me. Still, I guess what goes around comes around. Finally I can see the logic of having five kids. One of her children will be at her bedside pretty much until March.
Hey, a girl just walked in! No, hang on, TWO girls just walked in…
Montpellier appears to be a city of hospitals. They are everywhere. And the buildings that are not hospitals are clinics and the buildings not dedicated to the medical professions are driving schools. I saw a driving school today with a repair shop attached, I suppose for the poor students. Also, everybody here drives a 10-year-old Renault Twingo. Driving a car that ugly, you shouldn’t need to pass a driving test and you certainly shouldn’t take it to a body shop for repair if you put a ding in it. You should just drive it into the Mediterranean and leave it there.
It’s great to be in France again. I went to a very scummy Indian restaurant last night (I don’t get to ear Indian in Holland, so whenever I see a curry house I have to go in – even in France) and a man ordered a half bottle of house red and still insisted that the waiter let it breathe for a few minutes before pouring it into his glass. I had the house red too and, believe me, it didn't need to breathe, it needed life support.
I have to go. They’ve just put on Sade and turned down the lights. And a bloke who was also dining alone in the bistro has just walked in and he appears very drunk. I’m outta here.

Trains

2009-01-11T11:29:00.000-08:00

I’m not a very relaxed traveller. I would rather spend an hour and a half in a crowded departure lounge waiting for a plane than three minutes in a cab racing through traffic to make a connection.
So I was not all that happy about leaving myself just 45 minutes to make the cross-town trek from Paris’ Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon today. But travelling on a Sunday cuts down options and unless I wanted to get up really early and catch a slow train from The Hague to Brussels then change to get to Paris, I had no choice.
So imagine my delight when we got to Brussels on the fast train only to hear that it was buggered and would all passengers, including those carrying babies and all their worldly possessions in baby strollers, mind getting off and walking up the icy platform to get on another train that we really hope will be working.
I was screwed.
I took the opportunity to upgrade myself to first class – the conductors didn’t seem to be checking tickets - which had the advantage of being the first carriage on the train. If I was going to miss the TGV in Paris, I was not going down without a fight.
I won’t stretch this out – you know how it ends: Our hero, panting slightly, battles through hoards of French people defying the smoking ban on the TGV platform and leaps onto the departing train as its doors swish shut behind him.
Yes, there were hitches: The metro ticket I’d saved from a visit to Paris last year no longer worked so I had to buy another one causing me to miss one GdN-GdL metro; When the next metro arrived it was held up by a man of Arabian appearance who was lugging a rolled up carpet so large and heavy that the only reasonable conclusion to draw was that it contained at least one and maybe two dead bodies. Honestly, I checked the ground to see if it left a trail of blood as he dragged it up the stairs of the train.
Finally, as I looked for my reserved place in the TGV I was forced to ask a 300-pound skinhead reading (I swear to you this is true) a hunting knife magazine (who knew they even existed?) to vacate my seat.

Skating on thin ice

2009-01-07T13:32:00.001-08:00

Suddenly, everybody's an expert on ice.
All it takes is a week of temperatures that cause snot to pour out of my nose and freeze before it hits the ground and the whole of the Netherlands goes skating crazy and dredges up a barge load of dubious old wives' tales that are supposed to keep you safe.

The worst of them is: Creaking ice is not cracking ice.

This is a fable that has already probably caused one death - a 50-something bloke who went out on his own to strap on the skates in a deserted nature reserve when there was little more than a light crust on puddles. He was found five days later peering up at his friends from under ice that by that time was perfect for skating.

Usually, Julia's only encounter with caution is when she picks it up and throws it to the wind, but the dead skater story made her strangely circumspect about taking to the ice.

Irmie bought both the girls handsome white and pink skates but Julia would only go on extremely thick ice with me holding her hand.

Back to the creaking vs cracking ice. People insist to me that the booming/creaking we heard on the early days of the big freeze was just "the ice settling." I have no idea what this means, but decided it was nonsense when I was skating on a lake near our house.

I heard the familiar creaking and thought nothing of it until it was followed by what sounded like a gun shot and i saw a crack open up between my skates and shoot more or less from one side of the lake to the other. I made my excuses and left the ice. Nobody else seemed bothered. The small kids (who have never seen natural ice before) who had been carving me up just moments before continued to hurtle around the ice as if nothing had happened. And indeed, none of them sank. Admittedly they probably were carrying a little less weight than yours truly.

The fact is that the ice is full of cracks, but very few of them actually opens up to expose the water. It takes a bit of getting used to, but you end up skating over a lot of them and barely noticing them.

Today, I went to the next village along from where we live and the whole river was frozen solid - as you can see from the pic above.

Apparently you can skate from there to Leiden, a distance of several kilometers, only getting off the ice to avoid a big hole kept open for ducks.

The Dutch have a whole vocabulary built around iced over canals. Getting out and walking on your skates is called klunen and the hole itself is called a wak (any other hole is called a gat. don't ask me why a hole in ice deserves its own name). The traditional post-skate treat, is called zopie

and is supposed to be a mixture of port and beer with eggs, cinnamon and cloves. Alternatively you can drink pea soup called snert, which is excellent stuff.

You may remember me mocking people for buying old speed skates at traditional Queen's Day jumble sales. Those people are now having the last laugh as they flog off the skates at vast profits. I managed to get in early and buy a pair of nearly new speedskates for just 25 euros on the Dutch equivalent of eBay.
The experts propel themselves forward at alarming rates with slow and graceful outward sweeps of the blades. They stand upright or bent forward with their hands behind their backs clutching the protectors you put on the blades when you have to get off the ice to klun around a wak. The upper body barely moves as they glide along.

I, on the other hand, weave wildly left and right, leaning backwards and waving my skate protectors around above my head in a vain attempt to keep my balance.

The true speedskaters' technique for going around corners fast is known as (and I translate not all that loosely) getting your leg over. It involves (for a left turn) leaning into the corner on your left skate and then bringing the right skate around in front of your left and planting it to the left of the left foot. The experts almost seem to pick up speed as they do it. Suffice it to say, I haven't tried it.

I'm much better at falling than going forwards. I find that with a good thick sweater and jacket I can fall backwards and slide to a stop without breaking any bones - any of mine, at any rate. Not everybody is so lucky. Irmie, who is sporting bruised knees from falling off her bike on an icy road, watched on old bloke break his hip on the ice yesterday.

Anyway, I'd better go _ have to get out onto the ice again before dinner.

Snow way back

2008-12-29T12:40:00.000-08:00

While we were waiting for the turkey and ham fest to begin on Christmas Day, this amazing cloud came rolling towards mum's house like a sort of aerial tsunami. I was convinced it was going to bury the house under a thick layer of snow. Instead, it just kind of petered out before I'd had my first Brussels sprout.

However, the cloud convinced me that we needed to see some snow while we were sandwiched between the Alps and the Massif Central so the following day we bundled into two cars and armed with mum's vague instructions headed northwest in search of the white stuff.

Looking at the map with mum, I saw a large red road heading right up to the place I was pretty convinced would deliver a white slope suitable for sledging. But she assured me that a much smaller yellow line on the map was a quicker and easier way to get there.

We set off and 40 minutes later started seeing snow on either side

of the road. I was in the passenger seat next to Irmie and Rob and his kids were behind us.

I don't know if I've mentioned it here before but I'll come clean now: I hate heights.

So imagine my joy when the road started winding up a series of sharp turns none of which had so much as a kerbstone separating us from a precipitous plunge down the mountainside to our instant deaths. And the snow started settling on the road.

I began expecting to see terrified mountain goats trudging back shaking their heads.

After about 20 minutes (which felt to me like 20 hours) we pulled over in a snow-covered observation point. To my great relief, Rob agreed that it was madness to continue up to the top of the hill. His argument, which I was more than happy to buy into, was that while getting up might be OK, driving back down an increasingly icy road in gathering gloom was probably not a great idea.

We stayed where we were and had a pretty good snowball fight while French drivers screeched past showering us with slush.

Boardom

2008-12-22T14:56:00.000-08:00

Not a word since November 10.
What can I say? Life's been uneventful. I've been playing too much hockey. I just didn't have the inspiration.
As usual, it has taken a trip away from the vibrant metropolis that is Voorburg to get the blog creativity juices flowing again. That and an encounter with a wild boar.
We're in France with my mum for Christmas. My brother's arriving tomorrow with his family, the other brother is possibly tooling down from his snowbound home in the Alps for Christmas dinner.
The Ardeche, where mum lives, is beautiful in the summer but even prettier in the winter - there are no Dutch tourists moaning about the absence of their favorite brand of peanut butter from the supermarket shelves or lying butt naked on the banks of the local rivers frying themselves to a mahogany crisp. The rivers are real flowing rivers rather than strings of rapidly stagnating pools and the weather is beautiful. Today was crystal clear and cold with a stiff wind.
As we drove over the hills towards the valley where mum lives, I saw this panorama on one side. With the children keen to get to grandma's and the midday sun lighting the scene a little too harshly for my taste I decided against stopping.
But once the sun started setting, I headed back up the hill on my own and stood for 40 minutes by the side of a road - the only vantage point available amid the steep hills and dense undergrowth - snapping away hopefully on the off chance I'd manage to get a decent picture.
What I forgot in my haste to get up the hill before the sun disappeared below the horizon was that mum's part of the world is home to a large number of wild boars.
Serious animals. Big, bristling bags of muscle and tusk that are cranky at the best of times. But these are not the best times. This is hunting season, when every French man and his dog is out 12-gauge shot gun over his shoulder trying to bag himself the essential ingredient of a sanglier stew. These boars aren't wild, they are (with thanks to Not the Nine O'Clock News) livid.
None of this crossed my mind until I heard the unmistakable sound of a large pig trotting at pace through the bushes on the other side of the two-lane road to where I was standing behind my tripod.
I turned to face the noise about five meters away and while I couldn't see the bastard I swear I could almost smell its breath and feel its eyes boring into me (and I'll try really hard to make that the last boar/bore gag) with a potent mix of fear and loathing.
As I looked around, wondering what to do next, I saw that I was standing right in front of a small path leading off the asphalt and into the bushes on the opposite side of the road to where the boar, which was now _ I could hear this _ pacing up and down impatiently in the undergrowth. I was obviously blocking a well-trodden pig pathway. My side of the road was a good three meters above the bush, meaning that the path was the only way down for any self-respecting pig. A cursory glance down the path revealed not one but several tennis ball-sized pig turds.
It was decision time. The sun was about 10 minutes from setting and I'd already been hanging around in the cold for 30 minutes waiting for the afterglow to light up the hills. But was it worth risking the wrath of a pig that may or may not just have lost its life partner and three little piggie offspring to a hunter's shot?
I decided it was, particularly as it offered the chance of a pic of a crazed boar bearing down on me. I got my other camera - one with film in it - ready. It has a nice wide angle lens that I reckoned would probably get a piece of the pig even if I was shooting over my shoulder while running away at full speed (which, it occurs to me now over a glass of white Burgundy in mum's kitchen, is nowhere near the speed of a boar going at full bore - oops. sorry).
I'd love to be able to say I nailed the pig just as I sidestepped its charge and am waiting for the film to be developed to post it on the blog. But sadly it refused to show its snout even as I wandered back to the car after realizing that the sunset shot was a waste of my time because all the hills in the foreground just disappeared into shadows once the sun went down.
When I told an even more exaggerated version of this story to mum she just shrugged her shoulders and said she saw a big pig wander through her back garden on the way to the neighboring vineyard just the other day. So tomorrow night I plan to sit in the warm kitchen with another white wine and camera at the ready and shoot the boar as it strolls by.

puedo hablar espanol?

2008-11-10T13:54:00.000-08:00

Julia has a habit of surprising us.

It's usually just little things.

For example, she hides stuff - from lolly wrappers to half eaten bread rolls to socks and underpants. Anything she can't be bothered to put in a washing basket or rubbish bin she just stuffs somewhere out of sight and forgets it.

She can make a Dresden-after-the-firestorm type of mess in the blink of an eye of and genuinely not appear to notice it.

She NEVER flushes the toilet unless she's specifically ordered to.

Seen positively, these could all be evidence of a carefree spirit reluctant to be fettered by bourgeois conventions.

I however tend to see it as laziness - probably because I recognize it as inherited from her father.

So imagine our surprise when she started working hard at school.

Esther and Julia's school works on a system of giving pupils responsibility for their own work. They get a bunch of tasks on Monday and have to finish them by Friday.

I had Julia picked as the type of student who does nothing for four days and then has to rush to get it all done on day five.

It seems I underestimated her.

She came home today and said she'd finished all but one of her assignments and - honestly - wanted to start learning Spanish.

I suggested her English might benefit from a bit of polishing, but no Spanish it has to be.

Her teacher will probably tell us next week that Julia's been copying all her work from her neighbor and still getting it wrong in her haste to finish.

But for now we'll bask in the fact that Julia seems to have gotten competitive about matching Esther's good marks at school.

La vide es buena.

Belt tightening

2008-11-04T00:45:00.000-08:00

Times are hard.

If we're not all in recession already, we're hurtling that way so fast that there's no turning back. With that sombre economic outlook in mind, I thought it high time to start thinking about how to economize on our food expenditure and cut down waste.

Time for a cooking lesson at the Michelin-starred restaurant just around the corner from our house.

If there's one thing that really tugs at the purse strings, it's a lobster that hasn't been correctly rested after cooking and as a result becomes as tough as old boots when you get it out of the shell.

So with my old friend Daniel, visiting from England, I headed over to the Savelberg (www.restaurantsavelberg.nl) on Saturday with a group of like-minded men to spend the morning cooking our own lunch and drinking so much wine that everything we learned is now more or less lost in an alcoholic haze.

The menu was simple and obviously tailored to the credit crisis:

-Tartare of Brittany scallops with celery and apple on a bed of butternut squash puree. Washed down with an Italian pinot gris.

-Pheasant with mashed potato and sauerkraut followed by a ragout of wild mushrooms with more pheasant. Accompanied by a French grenache.

-Poached fig with home made star anise ice cream on a biscuit decorated with a peanut coated in sugar with a long thread of caramelized sugar attached that looked kind of like an antenna.

With a delicious sweet desert white whose provenance I can no longer remember.

The morning was touted as a lesson, and we were allowed to mess around at certain stages, but whenever some serious cooking was being done the chef Edwin (31 years and a man whose body mass index suggests to me that he enjoys his own cooking. a lot.) and his sous chef and pastry/desert chefs stepped in to ensure that we got an edible meal at the end of it all.

So I learned the crucial culinary skill of getting scallops (jetted in from Brittany that very morning in first class airline seats) out of their shells and cleaning them.

Use a blunt knife to lever open the shell (think 1970s ash tray) and then slide the blade along the inside of the flat underside of the shell to release the flesh. Then use a spoon with a sharpened edge to cut the meat away from the muscle that opens and closes the shell. Drop the scallop in iced water and rinse carefully to get rid of any sand.

It was a meticulous, time-consuming and labour-intensive process that gave the first indication of why I cannot afford to eat at the restaurant - fresh, high quality ingredients carefully prepared. Any fish that don't meet the restaurant's standards are sent back and probably end doing sterling service at a Chinese restaurant in The Hague.

The scallops were then (carefully) chopped up and squeezed into short lengths of pvc pipe with diced apple and lightly blanched celery. All mixed with lemon juice and sushi vinegar.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the kitchen, three live lobsters were hauled off death row and plunged into boiling water.

Not stock - no point. They're only in there three minutes and that leaves no time for stock to get through the armour plating and impart any extra flavor to the meat.

Edwin went into a long spiel about how plunging lobsters into boiling water was absolutely the most humane way off helping them shuffle off this mortal coil. He argued passionately against the practice of plunging a knife through their heads etc, etc, etc.

He need not have bothered with the sermon. The assembled students looked like they collectively couldn't have cared less about the plight of the lobsters just as long as they tasted good. (For more info than you could possibly want on the subject, I suggest David Foster Wallace's excellent article Consider the Lobster: www.lobsterlib.com/feat/davidwallace/page/lobsterarticle.pdf.

As it turns out, the lobsters didn't scream or rattle the lid of the pan as they tried to haul themselves out and three minutes later they were there looking red and ready to eat. The claws get ripped off and cooked for a couple more minutes because their shell is thicker.

At this stage, we began drinking some very nice champagne and Edwin kind of took over when it came to cooking the pheasants.

They were greased with oil infused with several herbs and spices then cooked in their own juices in a large pan.

DO NOT EVER cook your pheasants in the oven unless you want a bird as dry as the Australian Outback on your plate.

Obviously lobster and scallops may sound a little expensive for these troubled times, but essentially they're both things you can go out and catch yourself with a little training and time, a ticket to northern France and a pair of chain-mail gloves. Same with pheasants, of course. The lead shot in a few of them bore testimony to the fact that they had not been farmed and electrocuted - these birds had been pecking around a forest until pretty recently.

In my youth, my brothers, sisters and I used to occasionally drive around the woods with our dad running over pheasants that were then hung by their feet for a week or so in our outside toilet and then plucked and cooked. I don't know if our family was having trouble with the shopping bill those weekends or it was just a way of getting five kids out from under the feet of our mother for a couple of hours. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that you don't even need a Beretta over-and-under shot gun - any modern automobile will do.

Same story with desert. I had nothing to do with its preparation - who cares about coating peanuts in sugar when you can be torturing shellfish to death? It was basically just a fig, which if I'm not mistaken grow on trees. How cheap is that? The industrial ice cream maker that created the star anise ice cream looked a little less inexpensive.

So we then got to eat all this stuff and it tasted pretty damn good for a collection of freely available foodstuffs.

All in all a fine lesson in culinary economy to help you through the credit crisis.

Zutphen

2008-10-12T14:08:00.000-07:00

It's been a while. I have no real excuses.
Back to work after holidays. Back to the daily routine/grind. There just didn't seem much to write about.
On the upside, I now hold the record of 3-under-par on the girls' Wii golf game - and I can still use an apostrophe.
We just got back from an incredibly pleasant weekend away in the beautiful little town of Zutphen. We'd visited pretty towns beginning with every other letter of the alphabet, so it seemed like time.
Plus, it was our wedding anniversary today.
We received a handful of cards/emails from friends and family not one of which correctly guessed which anniversary it was - my mum was close with 11, as was our friend Wietske (who organized our wedding) who inacurately hedged her bets on 11 or 10 years. Irmie's uncle picks up the booby prize for furthest from the pin after weighing in with eight years. Irmie, scandalized, said: But Esther and Julia were born more than eight years ago. She's a Catholic.
When we got back today, Irmie's parents came through with a bunch of flowers and a card correctly congratulating us on our 12th anniversary - although it looked a bit like the 2 in 12 might have started life as a 1.
To celebrate a dozen years of wedlock and the fact that we're too poor to actually suffer very greatly from the credit crisis, we - and by we I mean Irmie - went shopping yesterday.
Actually, we were not wholly untouched.
Last week, the Icelandic bank that was holding our life savings went belly up and took our hard earned cash with it. Irmie, whose idea it was to deposit our wealth there because I'm too lazy to research things like what accounts give you the most interest, was a little upset to learn it had all gone down the toilet. So she was very happy indeed when the Dutch government took the politically inevitable decision to guarantee all deposits up to 100,000 euros. An amount that dwarfed our little chunk of readies.
Even so, we felt wealthy again.
The nice thing was that all the shops in Zutphen are in its beautiful town center which somehow both the Nazis and Allies managed to avoid bombing back to the stone age during the last days of World War II.
The town is on the banks of the river Ijssel and was once a thriving and prosperous inland port. As a result, it has little harbours, a spectacular church and hundreds of beautifully preserved old mansions and converted warehouses.
One of the nicest things about the whole weekend was that we left the girls with Oma and Opa. Yes, children enrich our lives in so many ways. Yes, we love them to bits. Yes, they're gorgeous. But come on parents, let's be honest, what is better than springing for a weekend off from the offspring?
We were able to wander about the town, looking at historic little courtyards and the remnants of ancient defensive walls and watch the sun go down over the Ijssel all without having to endure a single request for an ice cream, without hearing how boring ancient defensive walls and courtyards are and without hearing a word said about how sore anybody's legs/feet/arms were.
More importantly, we were able to go for a 50-kilometer bike ride this morning without any whinging requests to be pushed/turn around/stop for an ice cream.
Before the ride, we also got to lie in until - jikes! - 8:30 a.m. And when we went for breakfast at our B&B nobody complained about the fact that our hostess considered organic cheese laced with stinging nettles an acceptable foodstuff for first thing in the morning.
The bike ride was nice. We saw a whole bunch of storks.
Hang on, better look up that collective noun.
Wikipedia suggests both a phalanx and a muster (apparently a phalanx is when they're airborne so we saw a muster because they were all kind of standing around in a field).
I guess there must be more storks in New Zealand because they have far more CNs ranging from the unimaginative flight and flock to the more colorful cluster and clatter and then the plain odd filth of storks.
The nicest thing about the ride was spending four hours in the saddle and never tiring of things to talk about - which is pretty cool after eight years of marriage, let alone a dozen.

Pix

2008-09-12T01:12:00.001-07:00

My brother Rob's village in Burgundy.

Mum's house in France.

Esther relaxing in mum's pool.

Julia fixing her hair.

The family walking in the Cevennes.

Winter approaches

2008-09-12T00:52:00.000-07:00

Winter is apparently bearing down fast on Voorburg, so I thought it was about time to post the second half of my holiday blog while I can still sit at the computer in a t-shirt and with the back doors open.

Since returning from France, we also have visited again. We spent a very nice weekend in Paris meeting former colleague Meraiah and her family for lunch in the Luxembourg gardens, climbing the Eiffel Tower and generally behaving like the tourists we were.

The trip over on the train was very easy. Problem was we were on seats facing back toward where we'd come from rather than forward to where we were going.

My heart sank when I saw them. If anything is guaranteed to make Irmie sick it is not being able to see where she is going on any mode of transport faster than a bicycle. I haven't tested the theory, but I suspect walking backwards around our block could make her throw up.

And throw up she did. To Irmie's credit she waited until we actually drew into Gare du Nord before losing her lunch on the platform - while walking with the crowd of passengers who had also just disembarked.

And when Irmie vomits, Julia goes out in sympathy, so I had two puking girls walking down the platform and Esther going eeeeeuuuuwww and trying to get as far away from us all as possible.

We couldn't find a hotel room for all four of us so we rented an apartment from what turned out to be Paris' premier gay rental agency. Which meant that we got a beautiful place with a view of the Pompidou Center and a poster of a muscular black man wearing a grass skirt on our bedroom wall.

Lunch with Meraiah, Tim and Morgan was great. Meraiah nearly managed to tell Esther and Julia that Dingo is a pigeon killer, but luckily they weren't listening when she brought it up. This problem was created by the fact that Meraiah is one of only two regular reader of this blog not actually related to me.

Finally, the final holiday posting

2008-08-25T13:24:00.000-07:00

It's possible I may have come over a bit food snobby in my last post. This isn't really the case, I was just taking an easy shot at the Dutch and their eating habits. I'm ashamed to say that after insulting my adopted countrymen for lugging the contents of their larders hundreds of kilometers I discovered that Irmie had smuggled stuff called Ontbijtkoek (breakfast cake) into our luggage. It is a nasty stodgy spiced cake that reputedly has the power to keep one's bowel movements regular even when your diet consists only of white French baguettes and the livers of obese geese.

I never touch the stuff (onbijtkoek I mean - I can never eat enough fois gras) in the Netherlands but when I'm camping I have no desire whatsoever for regular bowel movements. I can think of few things I would rather have during a week of camping than a good dose of constipation.

Of course, if I'd been blocked up I would have missed one of the highlights of the holiday - the sign posted all over the one toilet/shower block of our campsite in the Cevennes.

Apparently some kids had been playing in or around the toilets. The campsite was run by a couple of hippies so instead of beating the offending children with sticks or telling their parents they wrote the following message (translated from the French by me) whose poetic philosophy reminded me that France is the nation that gave us not only pate made by torturing geese but also Beaudelaire and Sartre:

"Using the sanitation block as a playground is forbidden.

It shows a lack of respect for the campers and those who clean the sanitations.

(So far so straightforward, although I'm not sure how much effect appealing to the respect of 10-year-olds for their fellow campers is going to have, then the powerfully existential kicker).

The freedom of the one begins or ends with that of the other.

Beautiful isn't it? I read it and immediately felt like tracking down and guillotining the offending kids.

The campsite was on the banks of a fast-flowing mountain stream called the Tarn. Our tents were pitched right next to it. Alarmingly, there were lots of signs advertising evacuation routes and illustrated with little pictures of stick people fleeing fast-rising water. The picture above is of the river. The bridge crosses it at a point where it slows down and widens out enough for the kids to safely swim or canoe.

It was pleasantly primitive - there were no lights anywhere so the whole place pretty much was asleep by about 9pm. It was right next to an old footpath once used by Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson and his ass Modestine during a journey chronicled in a book called

Travels in the Cevennes with a donkey. These days, strolling along the route behind a stinking mule is considered a very cool way to spend a two-week holiday and yuppies trailing their rented pack animals wandered by a few times each day.

You can't blame them, the Cevennes is a very pretty part of France. After sweeping past our tent in a channel so narrow and shallow a donkey could wade across it in a couple of steps, the Tarn suddenly swells and has carved a pretty impressive gorge out of the granite hills. French people thought it would be amusing to build houses on the very scariest edges of the gorges which made it all the more spectacular (see vertical picture above).

We enjoyed a couple of days of solid sunshine and then what is known euphemistically as "good walking weather."

En France

2008-08-08T12:48:00.000-07:00

So Radovan finally arrived and we duly departed a week ago, scooting out of Voorburg at first light to renew my loathing for caravans as we scuttled through Belgium and Luxembourg.
First stop was at my brother Rob's house in Burgundy. Rob and his wife Sarah like their wine. To reach their new house, you leave the motorway at Beaune and follow a road called the Route du Grand Cru before turning up a steep hill just out of the beautiful village of Mersault.
For those of you not in the know, Grand Cru translates directly as Large Price, which is what you pay for a bottle of the local plonk.
Rob showed us around his new house in a ho-hum kind of a way - nice new kitchen, beautifully renovated rooms, pool's going in here, Yada-yada-yada. But then he started beaming with joy as he opened the heavy oaken door of a room on the lowest of the house's three levels. It was a large (crying out for a pool table) vaulted cellar big enough to hold thousands of bottles. It has a perfect (so the real estate agent told Rob) moistness and constant temperature that would make any self-respecting bottle of pinot noir want to settle down in its bedroom slippers with a good book and just lie there for several years maturing gracefully. There were already a few dozen bottles stacked up neatly at one end and I'm hoping we'll get a chance to drop in and add a few more on our way home.
In the evening, Rob and Sarah yanked the cork out of a good and just slightly less good bottle of the local white, made of chardonnay grapes, but tasting totally unlike the stuff I'm used to drinking in Australia. If they had any grand cru lying downstairs, they weren't foolish enough to waste it on me.
Sarah tried in vain to teach me to slurp the wine as I tasted it. This apparently mixes more air with the booze in your mouth, enhancing the flavors and underscoring its length - whatever that may be.
The gurgle involves leaning forward, taking a good slug of wine and then sucking in air through pursed lips. Sarah and Rob made this gravity-defying feat look easy, while my hopeless attempts made them wash their new floor.
After sobering up the next morning, we headed south to my mum's new house in the Ardeche. Last year, we camped nearby and helped mum move into one dusty room of what was essentially the shell of a building. This year, it is totally renovated - complete with pool and even a kitchen. The girls love the pool and the tv/dvd player in almost equal measure and I have to say I like both too. The pool ensures we all get plenty of exercise and the dvd player ensures Esther and Julia stay out of the sun around midday and allow Irmie and me to take a leisurely siesta.
The house is in a tiny little village flanked by vineyards on three sides and a river on the fourth and is the most peaceful place. I'm sitting typing this on the deck accompanied only by the chirping cicadas and a glass of the local white (Mersault it isn't, but it's pretty drinkable and spilling it on the floor out here while slurping is not too serious, you can just hose down the tiles).
However, from time to time you have to brave the local town of Vallon, which is a tourist hell at this time of year.
Irmie, Julia and I went to the local supermarket today to stock up for the next leg of the holiday - camping in a national park a couple of hours west of here - which begins tomorrow.
In town, we were reminded that as well as being rude overseas, the Dutch also are creatures of habit - particularly when it comes to buying food.
A few people have asked me if it's true that Dutch people empty their kitchens and take all their favorite stuff with them on holiday. I can confirm that this is the case.
The supermarket in Vallon is smart enough to realize that even a Dutchman cannot load his caravan down with enough food for a three-week holiday and so has several shelves dedicated to Dutch products ranging from peanut butter to mayonaise for smearing on chips.
In the customary interests of full disclosure, I admit here that we brought with us olive oil (Spanish, I think), salt and pepper and a couple of bags of liquorice for in the car. However, beyond that we like to sample the local fare - having frogs legs and snails for breakfast and garlic with everything.
In the supermarket we saw two Dutch blokes pushing a shopping trolley that contained: two cartons of Fristy, (a foul-tasting Dutch yoghurt drink), two cartons of Chocomel (chocolate-flavored milk usually drunk piping hot from the microwave with a dollop of whipped cream on top - very nice after an afternoon speedskating on the local canals, but it was 35 degrees outside today), one packet of edam cheese (stuff so horrible that not even Dutch people eat it back in the Netherlands). The list goes on. I think they even had Dutch soap.
It's sad that people eat this stuff in Holland, it's flat out bizarre that they would go to a country widely and rightly recognized as the center of the culinary universe and forgo a ripe, locally produced disc of goat's cheese or a slab of rocquefort and pick up an extortionately priced chunk of cheese that tastes alarmingly similar to the plastic it's wrapped in.
And here's a really strange and not wholly unrelated thing:
We've taken to eating an exceptionally good mass-produced vanilla ice cream here - it goes perfectly alongside a slice of apple tarte tartin and is made (so the tub informs us) using vanilla pods imported from Madagascar, which apparently is the source of all the world's really first-rate vanilla (who knew?).
Reading the back of the tub today, we discovered that this fragrant delicacy is produced by Unilever, a Dutch multinational that makes almost everything you buy on your average trip to the supermarket - from soap to deodorant to coffee. And yet you can't buy this stuff in the Netherlands - all you get there is stuff called whipped cream ice cream which tastes of nothing except maybe frozen milk. I guess Unilever knows where it can get away with selling blandness and where it has to inject a little flavor into its foods.
I'd love to post a few holiday snaps of us sneering at Dutch tourists, but I can't transfer my photos from my camera to my mum's laptop so you'll just have to wait til we get back to Voorburg in a couple of weeks' time.

No RK

2008-07-28T23:11:00.001-07:00

Julia woke up this morning and said: "Is that man here yet?"

The answer, I'm afraid, is no. That man, and who can expect an 8-year-old to be able to pronounce Radovan Karadzic, is still not here.

Esther's 10th birthday

2008-07-28T13:51:00.000-07:00

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.

Ruudness

2008-07-15T12:05:00.000-07:00

A Dutch radio station reported today that Dutch people are rude. I would put a link to the article in here, but they weren't polite enough to translate it.
They reported this as news, but anybody who has had anything to do with the Dutch for any length of time will probably know what they mean.
I only skimmed the report but it was interesting to see that it was not only foreigners like me who live in the Netherlands who thought the Dutch are rude, it was also Dutch expats living overseas who felt ashamed of their countrymen/women's impoliteness.
Forms of politeness Hollanders haven't quite mastered include, according to this survey, saying thank you, not tossing litter on the street, joining the queue at the end, holding open doors for whoever is walking behind you and offering to help others.
This last one seems a little unfair to the Dutchman who copped a couple of bullets in the gut when he tried to help a woman being beaten up by her boyfriend on a Melbourne street a couple of years ago, but I can relate to some of the others.
I've never really noticed not having doors held open for me, but I have registered surprise bordering on bemusement when I've held doors open for people here.
One of the first culture shocks Irmie had when we got to Sydney was the bizarre, in her eyes, spectacle of people queuing for the bus on Lane Cove road. The commuters were all standing extremely neatly in orderly lines tailing back - sometimes 100 metres or more! _ from the bus stop. Irmie thought it was hilarious. Meanwhile, at Dutch railway stations I often have to fight my way out of trains because of the torrent of people storming to get into the doors before my fellow passengers and I have had a chance to get out.
My fine friend Daniel - as quintessential an English gentleman as you could ever hope to meet - has never forgiven or forgotten the Amsterdam tram driver who, when he very politely told her he didn't have the exact change to buy a ticket replied, "Well, then you have a problem." No offer of help. No suggestion of a solution. Meanwhile, probably 90 percent of the Dutch people on the tram hadn't been polite enough to buy themselves a ticket at all.
The Dutch word Lul, meaning cock, dick, knob etc, is also a favorite in Daniel's household after he heard it shouted at a car by a cyclist in Amsterdam. In defense of Dutch people, I think it may have been me who shouted the expletive at a Dutch driver.
I like to think of the Dutch as blunt and to-the-point. When you ask a Dutch person a question, you get a clear straightforward answer. They don't dress it up or water it down with polite platitudes, they just give you the truth, whether you like it or not. This can come off as impolite until you get used to it. I no longer notice it.
If you want obsequious bowing and scraping, go live in England. Which I read today is turning into the world capital or knife crime. I can see it now: excuse me my dear chap, would you mind awfully if I inserted this blade swiftly between your third and fourth ribs? Thanks awfully.
I called a Dutch etiquette school in The Hague today seeking comment on the survey, but the headmaster Ruud van Natuur's only response was, "go fuck yourself."

What could possibly have gone wrong?

2008-07-04T03:53:00.000-07:00

I was pretty blase about the whole vasectomy thing. What could possibly go wrong, I asked myself.
Here's the answer:

A Romanian court has ruled a doctor must pay €500,000 in damages to a patient for chopping off his penis during a temper tantrum.
Naum Ciomu argued he was suffering from stress in late 2004, when during a routine operation to correct a testicular malformation, he suddenly lost his temper and sliced off the patient’s penis.
Shocked medics watched as Ciomu then placed the severed penis on the operating table and chopped it into small pieces.
Ciomu said his tantrum was brought on after he accidently cut his patient’s urinary channel and "overreacted" to the situation. He told the court it was a temporary loss of judgment due to personal problems.

It's a snip!

2008-07-01T13:11:00.000-07:00

After long and careful consideration, Irmie decided it was time for me to get a vasectomy. I was less than enthusiastic at first, but after reading my Australian/American friend Meraiah's blog chronicling her recent infant-induced sleep deprivation horrors I finally agreed and went today to get, as they say here, helped. Actually, they say that when you get your dog or cat done, but I felt about the same.
We drove to a horrendous 1960s monstrosity of a hospital in Delft that was halfway through being demolished. Sadly, the department I was booked into was still standing.
I took a seat in a corridor in which were sitting two other couples clearly awaiting the same fate. One bloke was jabbering away excessively trying in vain to make light of the situation, the other was clutching the hand of his wife (I'm guessing vasectomies are carried out exclusively on men with wives, rather than girlfriends). I opted for sullen silence.
I was third in line so got to see the other two go in and then limp, legs spread wide, back out again.
When it was my turn to go in, a youngish bloke came out wiping his hands on a paper apron on the front of which was a BLOOD STAIN.
He had a small, ragged scar on his top lip which I couldn't help thinking he had got from the involuntary lashing out of a patient's leg. I was also concerned that he had tried to stitch it up himself and made a pretty poor job of it. None of this inspired a great deal of confidence in me.
He had as a sidekick a plump woman in her 50s wearing a hairnet and matching apron - though without the blood.
She instructed me to get out of my trousers, drop my drawers and lie down on the table in front of me. The room was a kind of half-arsed operating theatre - a table draped with paper and one of those scary lights with multiple bulbs familiar to me only from TV hospital dramas.
By way of small talk to relax me (I mean, seriously, why bother even trying. A giant bong stuffed with the finest Lebanese hashish wouldn't have relaxed me.) She complimented me on the excellent job I had done shaving the area to be treated.
I didn't have the nerve to tell her I'd actually gone and bought myself a tube of de-hairing cream rather than take a razor to myself. I know how often I cut my face shaving to be pretty sure that hacking away down there with a blunt bic disposable might have put the urologist out of a job.
The good doctor then picked up my shriveled johnson to get it out of the way and with it still in his icy grip - and without any trace of irony - said: "you might feel a little prick now."
I had my eyes closed by now. I preferred not to see what was happening and what kind of instruments were being deployed on my nether regions. The one redeeming fact about my ordeal was that it didn't make any noise. At the dentist, I can handle the pain, the thing I hate is the noise of bits of my body being chipped/filed/drilled away.
While there was no noise, there was music. I've been unsuccesfully wracking my brain all day trying to come up with an appropriate soundtrack for a vasectomy. All suggestions gratefully received. I may make an itunes playlist. Anyway, hard as I've struggled to come up with something appropriate, I think you'll all agree there couldn't be a LESS appropriate song than Light My Fire by The Doors, and yet that was what was playing. As Sweeny Todd was tackling my wedding tackle, Jim Morrison was moaning "Come on baby, light my fire. Try to set the night on fire." I suppose it could have been worse: It could have been my favorite Doors song, The End.
As he was hacking away, the doctor and his assistant were bitching about various colleagues and they seemed to be particularly disparaging about surgeons. This alarmed me as I was under the impression I was undergoing surgery.
I could draw this story out more, but the fact is that it was all over inside 15 minutes and apart from feeling two little pricks (one each), it was pretty painless. I asked the doctor if I would be able to play hockey a day after the operation and he replied, "You will be able to, but you won't want to." I now know what he meant. It's exactly 12 hours later and there's not a great deal of sharp pain. What it feels like is that somebody has grabbed my scrotum, twisted it through 180 degrees, stretched it down to my knees and then let it twang back up again. It's not a sensation I'm enjoying. Tomorrow I have to ride my motorcycle to Utrecht. I'm not looking forward to it.
On the whole, however, I have to confess that the whole ordeal was not as bad as I'd feared. In fact the worst thing about it all was the cup of truly horrific coffee I was made to drink before being allowed to flee - legs spread wide - the crumbling, condemned hospital.

Poor again

2008-06-29T14:50:00.000-07:00

I got back from Austria/Switzerland to find the children and Irmie in ruddy health as usual. It's a wonder to me how Irmie juggles all this household stuff in my absence. It's bordering on a miracle that she doesn't complain about it very much at all.

And then the sad realization strikes me that maybe the reason she copes so well in my absence is because I do so very little beyond making more mess while I'm here.

Irmie is always genuinely staggered when I forget to give Esther and Julia milk with their Vegemite and toast (you can take the girls out of Australia, but you can never take Australia out of the girls) at breakfast time. She doesn't call me a bad father, but her amazement that I am able to forget this says enough.

I noticed today that Irmie also had mown the lawns while I was away and managed to keep my tomato plants alive - something I fear I will not be able to do in the coming days and weeks even though I have to look over them every time I peer out of my office window.

Of course there has to be a down side. I just checked our extremely modest portfolio of mutual funds and discovered that while Irmie has been cleaning teeth and carpets and cars, she has allowed our wealth to shrink by about 15 percent in the three weeks I was working my fingers to the bone eating lightly grilled venison in the Austrian Alps. This sounds bad (the financial loss, not the venison - the venison was fantastic), but fortunately given the state of our finances that 15 percent equals about 100 euros.

Now I'm back, I pledge to feed and water the girls every time I remember it, to avert stagflation in the US economy and to bring down the price of a barrel of crude to about $50. If I have any time left after that I'll mow the lawn.

2008-06-27T07:14:00.000-07:00

It's all over. Russia slumped to their second defeat of the tournament to Spain, sending the Russkis and me packing. Time, for a brief summing up.

Things I will miss about Euro 2008:
Frauleun Frick at my hotel in Leogang and her sometimes radically undercooked boiled eggs. Seriously, those things were almost clucking.
Guus Hiddink. A walking quote machine and, more importantly, a gentleman. At one crazy mixed zone (where 300 journalists line up behind barriers and try to interview one man), Hiddink stood at the base of a set of steps and told everybody to go stand on the steps so we could all see and hear him. Doesn’t sound like much, I know, but he is the only person with common sense enough to come up with such a simple solution. UEFA was certainly stumped. What’s more, when all the scummy journalists tried to elbow one another out of the way for a good position he said: “If you can’t help one another, I’m not going to help you and I’m getting on the bus and leaving.” I’ve never seen TV reporters move so quickly to accommodate each other.
Mountains.
Weissbier.
Good football.

Things I won’t miss:

Wiener schnitzels. Seriously Austria, is a slab of meat you’ve bashed flat with a hammer and fried in breadcrumbs the best you can come up with as a national dish? Apparently, they also make a mean cake around these parts, but I haven’t had one. All the konditorei (cake shops) seem to be staffed by stern looking women in starched white aprons who would not approve of my dusty thongs and gnarled toe nails.
Rain.
Smelling my dirty socks each morning to determine which would be the least offensive to my fellow human beings.
Passive smoking. How Russians can live on only red bull and fags remains a mystery to me.
Bad football.
Bad hotels. I don’t mind basic, and call me picky if you want but I object to overpriced ugly concrete boxes built in places fit only for sewage plants with staff imported from east European prisons. There was a sewage plant, or a nuclear reactor – I couldn’t work out which – next to my shocking hotel in Basel and the Airo tower smells like raw sewage. A colleague staying here swears his room has a very clear smell of urine in the carpet. The Leogang hotel was the most basic of all, but the people who ran it cared about the place and its guests. An example: On my first day there, I was cursing my luck because the room only had one plug socket and it was so far from the little table that I couldn’t plug my laptop in. I solved this by moving an unbelievably heavy fold-out bed and the table, but I still couldn’t watch football on the TV and work at the same time without running down my laptop battery. When I got back to my room that evening, there was an extension cable with three sockets. That didn’t take much effort on anybody’s part but it made me fall in love with the place.

My new gulag.

2008-06-26T00:57:00.000-07:00

This is my newest gulag, sorry, hotel. It's in Vienna, but just barely.
One of the things I find interesting and unexpected about Vienna, having never really bothered to look for the place on a map, is its proximity to the former Eastern Bloc. As you drive in, you see signs to places like Ljubljana and other cities with too many consonants in their names.
Vienna apparently has a lot of beautiful old architecture - cathedrals, palaces and the like. But I haven't seen them yet. I've seen the newish Ernst Happel stadium where tonight's semifinal and the weekend's final will be played and I've seen this hotel, but that's about it so far. Hopefully I can see something pretty today.
The hotel Airo Tower Hotel is a grim reminder of Vienna's closeness to eastern Europe. In fact, I suspect that when communism collapsed an enterprising entrepreneur actually went to someplace behind the former Iron Curtain and dragged this concrete monstrosity in its entirety back into Vienna. If you listen carefully in the morning, you can almost hear it coughing and hawking up phlegm. The noise can't be the air conditioning, because there doesn't appear to be any and again the temperatures here are in the 30s and muggy. This place must have been the original case study when people began talking about sick building syndrome.
Oddly, it's next door to a health spa that is populated entirely by ancient people with walking frames or sticks. I went for a run in a park behind the hotel yesterday and from a hill I could see the wrecks of humanity sunning themselves on lawns behind the architectural wreck of my hotel. It was not a pretty sight.
The mugginess last night set off a great thunder storm in Vienna during the first semifinal - if you were watching Germany-Turkey, you probably saw the effects as the storm is being blamed for knocking out power at the international broadcast center, meaning that tv images of the second half were regularly plunged into darkness.
The storm was so powerful, we journalists were actually ordered out of the media center, which is a glorified tent that has to be emptied in winds over 80 kmh. In the traditions of frontline sports journalism, we all ignored the evacuation decree and I finished writing a story about the blackout and storm. In the interests of full disclosure, I'd have to admit that the evacuation order probably came a little late. A half hour earlier, it looked like we might get blown away, but by the time we were ordered out it was barely raining.

Red army marches on, again

2008-06-22T05:25:00.000-07:00

Well, the Russians didn't read their script.
Basel was totally full of Dutch fans yesterday - about 100,000 to add to the city's usual population of 160,000. Bars ran dry, fans leapt off high bridges into the fast-flowing Rhine - if the cops in the barge holding hooking the drunks out of the water missed, I suppose they'd just keep on floating until they got to Rotterdam and then clamber out.
It was one huge party until the match started and it soon became clear the Russians were going to win. Ruud van Nistelrooy managed to make it interesting by scoring a late equalizer, but the Russians were so much better than the Dutch in extra time it was almost embarrassing.
I haven't been into Basel today, but I guess there are a lot of hungover, depressed Dutch fans lying under trees. Meanwhile, my photographer has disappeared, with our car, into the city with his wife leaving me in a very, very crappy hotel looking our of my window at what appears to be a market place for stolen cars on the rooftop carpark of a furniture store that dominates the industrial park that houses the hotel.
Basel, on the other hand, is gorgeous. Floating down the Rhine is a local pastime. I spent the afternoon before the game with a colleague sitting on a bar's terrace built over the river. The bar was equipped with showers and a ladder/pontoon construction that meant people who leapt into the river upstream could get out, clean off whatever chemical filth had stuck to them in the water and then have a beer. An incredibly civilized set up. We resisted the temptation to have a dip - the water was 15 degrees and flowing very fast and the bar served very good coffee.
So I'm here for a few days yet. Semifinal against either Spain or Italy on Thursday in Vienna and final on Sunday if necessary. I HAVE to get some laundry done.

Train troubles

2008-06-21T03:11:00.000-07:00

Why is it that train conductors think I understand and in some way empathise with what they seem to perceive as their problem, namely that their filthy, stinking train is running 45 minutes late?It’s not their problem, it’s my problem.
As I crossed the border today into Switzerland - the land that invented time and where everything runs according to schedule – the conductor of my train announced that because of a technical problem they were running three-quarters of an hour late. No apology, just gratitude for my understanding.
I could not possibly be any less understanding.
In fact, I’m struggling to suppress the urge to take a large spanner to the train and then the conductor.
I’m only on this train because my previous connection in Austria suddenly just ceased to exist. I got up early this morning and got a lift to Saalfelden near Leogang. From there, a train took me on a hair-raising trip through the mountains to Feldkirch. There, I had an hour stop before my next train left so I went into town (which is very pretty, by the way) and had a sandwich followed my a sensational ice cream and espresso.
I went and sat under the platform sign advertising my next train until one minute after it was due to arrive the sign simply changed to another train.
I went and politely enquired at the ticket office where the fuck my train was and they said it had been replaced by a bus, which had already left. Nobody told me.
They helpfully booked me on the next train an the one after that.
Finally, I got on this God-forsaken locomotive which eventually will take me to Zurich. From there, I have to wait again for the next train to Basel. By the time I get to that city, I will have missed Guus Hiddink’s pre-quarterfinal press conference and probably the Russian team’s final training session. Thankfully, my good friend and colleague Raf is covering for me and I wrote a story based on a few quotes I’d been saving for just such a rainy day.
Even so Swiss Railways, please do NOT EVER assume you have my understanding that your crappy train has a technical problem.

Update from blighted train: Switzerland is now trying to charm me by having the railway run alongside a beautiful light blue lake with accompanying cliffs and meadows.
But it’s not going to work. Unless I have an exceptionally good cheese fondue and a gallon of fine pinot noir with Raf tonight, I will never forgive Switzerland for making me miss a press conference.

The hills are alive with the sound of ... panting.

2008-06-19T10:41:00.000-07:00

Given my fears of abduction by crazy Austrians, I was more than a little alarmed when the delightful matriarch of my hotel, Fraulein Frick, said to me at breakfast the other day that she wanted to show me a "special place."
I needn't have worried.
Instead of an S&M dungeon, she brought a map and said there was a beautiful walk in the mountains I should take if I got the time.
I feared I wouldn't make it, but Russia's 2-0 defeat of Sweden in Innsbruck gave me an extra day in Leogang.
I should have known they'd win. I pretty much guaranteed it when I packed my suitcase and hauled it to Innsbruck and booked a seat on the overnight train to Vienna so I could write the Russian team's obituary there the following day before flying home.
So after getting back to Leogang at 3 this morning I woke up at 8, had breakfast and followed Fr. Frick's meticulous instructions to what she described as a nice half-hour stroll that very few people knew about.
What she failed to mention, though I suppose with hindsight I could have expected it, was pant-wettingly scary drive around a string of hairpin bends to get there.
When I finally, dizzily stepped out of the car, I was in the car park of a mountain chalet restaurant/hotel as seen on the lid of countless boxes of chocolates around these parts.
I set off up a well-trodden path past through a gently sloping pasture holding the cow pictured below and a herd of his/her friends as well as a couple more picturesque mountain huts. Looming over it all was the imposing rock wall of the Hochkonig mountain, which measures 2,941 meters in its stockinged feet.
Have you ever had the experience where you (talking silently to yourself) repeat a word over and over until it loses all meaning and just becomes an odd sound? I had it today with the word loom.
Looking back at that last sentence, it makes me feel like I'm going insane so please somebody say you know what I'm talking about.
So anyway, I set off at a brisk clip past the cows thinking it was a nice stroll to shake off the cobwebs of the late night and early start.
Then I rounded the first corner and saw the narrow path winding up, and up, and up. Fr Frick had promised me an easy walk to a hostel at the foot of the cliffs where I could have lunch. Instead, I wondered if I was going to need ropes and crampons.
Mercifully, the sun was shining as I began the final ascent of a path that seemed to have no end.
Just as I began to fear I would keep walking up the cursed mountain until I passed out, I lumbered, sweating and panting around a corner and there before me was the hostel and a sort of beer garden occupied by about two dozen hikers, all of them well into their 70s, who looked like they'd just woken up. I'm pretty sure there was a secret escalator somewhere for the old crones.
I had a cup of coffee while I got my breath back. All the oldies were drinking half-liter glasses of lager as they compared one another's nordic walking sticks.
It must be an odd place to live for the couple that runs the hostel. I suspect they were banished there because of their poor wood stacking skills. Their pile was such a mess I couldn't bring myself to take a picture of it.
My trip back down was uneventful apart from seeing a woodpecker pecking wood.
I promised myself a bowl of the local speciality when I got back down the hill - clear beef broth with a sort of semolina dumpling floating in it. But just before I got there two coach loads of more geriatric climbers had arrived and were ordering everything on the menu. I wandered out, pausing briefly to admire the dead fox in the entrance that had been stuffed and posed standing on its hind legs holding a hunting rifle. The indignity of it all.

Have a cow

2008-06-19T06:01:00.000-07:00

You wanted a cow, wearing a cow bell, standing in an alpine meadow with a mountainous backdrop. You're getting a cow, wearing a cow bell, standing in an alpine meadow with a mountainous backdrop.
I don't think a trip to Austria's Tirol region would have been complete without this particular picture.

I found this beauty on a walk today. I searched in vain for both Edelweiss and the Von Trapp family.

Man of the moment

2008-06-16T08:16:00.000-07:00

This is Andrei Arshavin. If anybody is going to get Russia to the quarterfinals, he's the man. He's been suspended for the first two games here but can play against Sweden. Russia has to win while the Swedes can afford a draw and go through to a quarterfinal against Holland. I'm counting on him.
Last night was entertaining. I went to my favorite restaurant to eat venison and watch the Czech-Turkey game on their giant screen but the place was so full of exceptionally drunk Russians that I had to leave. The spectacle of a 55-year-old man in traditional Russian tourist attire of knee length yellow shorts, calf length black socks, white shoes and a baseball cap trying to grope his waitress was one I will take with me to my grave.
I went back to my hotel where they have a smaller screen and worse food, but at least I know the drunken Russians there as I have breakfast with them. One man had an expensive night - he bet 500 euros on the Czech Republic to win and hedged his bets by putting another 500 on the draw. Imagine his delight when Turkey scored its injury time winner. He'd already lost about 100 betting on table football. I think the man has a slight gambling problem. The only good thing was that his losses finally shut him up. He'd been shouting all night and even the other drunk Russians seemed to be tiring of him.

Woodpile #2

2008-06-15T04:19:00.000-07:00

Today's woodpile - with a bonus collection of antique tools and sleds thrown in for free - is brought to you courtesy of a young farmer with a savage dog who lives on the edge of Leogang. The dog strongly objected to me taking the picture, but stopped just short of mauling me to death.

This is a handsome stack indeed. I'm not sure the b&w picture shows it, but you can see that on the right is a newer stack than on the left. This seems a neat way of dealing with a problem I've been pondering ever since I began my stack studies, namely what happens when you actually want to burn a couple of logs?
The inherent problem with wood stacks is that the stuff that has been there the longest, which is therefore the driest and best for the fire, is inevitably going to be on the bottom of the pile. Yanking out a couple of choice sticks could bring your whole pile tumbling down around your Tirollean ears. I suspect people probably maintain two stacks, but this is the first example I have seen of piles next to one another.
And while you're studying the pic, check out the truly handsome stacking around the two windows. This man is a master of his craft. (I always assumed wood stacking was a guy thing, like barbecuing and smoking cigars, but like those two traditionally male pursuits women seem to be muscling in. I saw a lady lugging some pretty serious lumber around her garden the day before yesterday.

Red Army

2008-06-15T04:12:00.001-07:00

So the "visual action of Russian fan supporting on the match with Greece" in Salzburg turns out to be a whole bunch of Russians waving flags.
"Due the hymn of Russian Federation" they waved red, white or blue flags to look (kind of) like a giant Russian tricolor. It was indeed a "great composition on Russian tribunes." I'm not quite sure the picture does it justice.
More interestingly, Russia kicked into gear in a big way and booted defending champion Greece out of Euro 2008 with a 1-0 win that could easily have been 3-0. A win against Sweden in their final game should seal a dream quarterfinal (for me, anyway) with the mighty Dutch team in Switzerland.
By the way, did anybody notice how I managed to wait 11 days before using the phrase Red Army? I'm proud of myself. I haven't used it once in AP copy because I know it wouldn't make it past the editing desk.

Russain press release

2008-06-13T08:31:00.001-07:00

Covering the Russian team here in Austria can be tough. The Soviet Union may have dissolved a quarter of a century ago, but there's something distinctly Kremlinesque about the media operation. The team holds a media briefing each morning at 10 a.m. at which team spokesman Ilya comes and shakes all the journalists' hands and then leaves. Coach Guus Hiddink declared the team's hotel a no-go zone for journalists, but he's given at least two one-on-one interviews there himself and I regularly hang out by the front door and interview players (with the help of my new Russian journalist friend, Sergey). Which is fortunate, because the football federation's English language press releases sometimes lose a little in translation. Here's a recent one. Sausage and homemade sauerkraut for anybody who can tell me what it means. I've itallicized my favorite sentence:

RUF and AFFU discussed questions about performance organization on a match Russia- Greece with Salzburg’s authority.
On June 12-th there was meeting between representatives of FUR, AFFU and representatives of Salzburg security structure on Euro 2008. During this conference both sides discussed details of visual action of Russian fan supporting on the match with Greece, which will be on June 14 on a stadium “Wals- Siezenheim”. As a AFFU’s scenario due the hymn of Russian Federation before the beginning of the match with Greece, will be great composition on Russian tribunes (organizers keep the design in a secret). Representatives of Salzburg arena discussed and give approvement and give help for the visual action preparing.Austrians marked high level of Russian supporting on the first match between Russia and Switzerland in Innsbruck. Nobody’s fans, except Russian fans does not prepare any visual actions. Euro organizers assure RUF and AFFU about aprovement on the next supporting, in case, if it will be regarding the UEFA’s rules. On a conference were manager of RUF°s international department Fedyshina Ekaterina, manager of press-centre Malosolov Andrey, manager of iniciative group Pugachev Andrey, and security officer of the stadium “Wals-Siezenheim” Rayan Olt and UEFA’s security coordinator in Austria Raynhard Rasoher. The official partner of RUF and AFFU for providing visual actions is magazine “Total football”

Clouds clear

2008-06-11T02:37:00.000-07:00

I am a bore about how beautiful Australia's landscape is, but you have to hand it to the Europeans: they know how to do mountains. After days of low-hanging cloud, I woke up yesterday to clear blue skies and a view of the mountains towering over the valley my hotel is in. The village of Leogang definitely looks prettier in sunlight. This is the view from my balcony.
I then went to Innsbruck to watch Russia get hammered 4-1 by Spain. By match time, a heavy thunderstorm was rolling around the mountains that ring the city. With lightning flashing around, I had to climb a temporary metal scaffolding staircase five floors to the press tribune. It didn't feel safe.

Wood you believe it

2008-06-11T02:16:00.000-07:00

Maybe they don't have central heating around these parts, maybe it's a product of the same mentality that keeps the streets so clean. Whatever it is, the Austrians seem to lavish huge amounts of care and attention on their woodpiles. Driving between Russia's base in Leogang and Innsbruck, where it played its first match last night (thrashed 4-1 by traditional tournament underachievers Spain), I saw plenty of meticulously stacked logs up against the sides of houses, in barns and surrounding garage doors. It's like a pyromaniac's heaven here. One match and the whole valley would go up.

2008-06-06T14:01:00.000-07:00

Odd country,

Austria

. I’ve tried in vain to find a piece of litter on the streets of Leogang, the sleepy skiing village I’m based in while covering Russia at Euro 2008. Yet the same meticulous nation that won’t drop a lolly wrapper on the road also produces people who lock up and molest girls/daughters for decades. If there’s a link between these two phenomena, I can’t see it.
What I also can’t see at the moments are the Austrian Alps. I’m slap bang in the middle of them, but all I’ve had for my first two days here are brief glimpses of craggy peaks between rain clouds that have descended on pretty much the whole Euro 2008 tournament. A friend of mine is in Lausanne and he has the same weather.

What I also haven’t seen much of is the Russian team. A little bit disappointing as I’m trying hard to interview them and generally get to know them before their first match next Tuesday against notorious big tournament chokers Spain. Russia’s Dutch coach Guus Hiddink has already cancelled two morning training sessions and last night only answered one question before getting onto the team bus.
I have however seen lots of Russian journalists and discovered why their country is going through such an economic boom – to a man (and the Russian press pack is, to a man, a man) they smoke like chimneys and appear to drink only Red Bull. These people must never sleep. Having said that, many of them still manage to exude an air of Communist-era lethargy.
I’m staying at a, how can I put this? Quaint skiing chalet-style hotel. A few things it doesn’t have: WIFI access; credit card-style door keys (my back hurts from carrying my key and its baroque, heavy metal key ring up and down the two flights of stairs to my room); little bars of soap and bottles of shampoo. This is a disappointment to me, who didn’t pack any grooming products beyond a toothbrush. Instead, my shower has one of those dispensers of two-in-one body/hair wash stuck to the wall. The hotel also appears to have no guests apart from me and Sergey, the AP photographer I’m working with here.
What it does have is Alpine charm. The hostess, Frauleun Frick, is incredibly friendly and helpful. She boils a mean egg and speaks good English, which is more than most Austrians appear to be able to do. I note that I can’t speak German, so I can’t really be upset with them for that.
Its also got a bunny rabbit made of straw and sporting a bow tie on the stairs, a HUGE jigsaw of a generic Alpine scene that has been glued together, framed and hung on a wall, and a cheese plant that looks, from the size of the thing, to be a remnant of the 1970s. At breakfast this morning, it had a selection of four different fruit juices and no glasses to pour them into.
It also has that same almost sinister Austrian efficiency that I assume keeps the streets polished. Every day as I eat breakfast, somebody cleans my room to within an inch of its life. How this mystery cleanliness operative knows I’m gone and slips in and out of my room in my brief absence is a mystery to me. (apologies if this sounds like a far less funny version of David Foster Wallace’s account of his cabin cleaner on a luxury cruise liner – I swear I only now noticed the similarity. Anybody who hasn’t read DFW’s essay about life on a cruise liner – A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again - I strongly suggest you do so at your earliest convenience).
This village has just one restaurant, which is a disappointment in more ways than one. Lovely patron, but an incredibly dubious menu, that mixes Austrian staples of bacon and more bacon with Italian and Mexican influences. Given that the menu is available in either German or Russian, it makes every meal a little adventure. Tonight, he was serving beer to a couple of 13-year-old boys who were propping up the bar. He seemed happy to do this just so long as he splashed a little Coca Cola in their half-litre glasses of lager.
Odd country.

The Pigeon Detective

2008-05-27T13:56:00.000-07:00

It was one of those moments that makes you proud to be a parent. Akin to a baby's first smile, or faltering first steps, the first full night's sleep.

Yes, today Dingo killed her first bird.

And like so many of those other child-rearing achievements, I missed this one too.

Fortunately for me, Dingo had clearly taken a while killing the bird and had achieved it only after apparently bringing the unfortunate prey into the house and shaking loose two pillows worth of plumage. So there was still plenty to see.

Let's be honest here, if I'm going to apply the baby's first steps analogy this was more like stumbling around the room grabbing chairs, tables and parents' hands for balance.

The bird in question was a clinically obese wood pigeon that waddled around our back garden in the manner of a Midwestern American in a shopping mall. I'm surprised I'd never seen it wearing ill-fitting leggings and munching a donut with a bucket of Coke tucked under its wing. I'm pretty sure it smoked. It treated the garden like its own personal convenience store - picking up scraps the girls dropped or threw from the table and pecking whatever it is that birds peck off the floor all the time. It was onto a good thing, or so it thought.

The point I'm trying to make is that this was not a tough bird to catch.

Whenever it reluctantly flapped away because somebody had entered the yard, the fence would sway under its weight as it landed and mopped its brow from the exertion.

Nevertheless, Dingo still had to make her move and cross a key psychological barrier - from half-hearted harrier to successful hunter.

She's been practicing stalking birds for months as I walk her along the canal near our house but has always seemed content with scaring the ducks and coots into the water rather than actually trying to snack on one of them.

So I was more than a little surprised to come downstairs around lunchtime today to find the dining room and kitchen floor all but invisible under a carpet of feathers and Dingo standing outside, hunched over more feathers and looking guilty.

As I went outside, she immediately went and lay on her back underneath the barbie - the sign that she'd done something more horrendous than her usual trick of creating circular patches of scorched earth in our lawn with her agent orange piss.

That was when I saw the pigeon, one eye open, looking up at me with an expression that mixed surprise with disappointment. Although the eye I could see was open there was no question the thing was dead. Something - and now I noticed Dingo had flecks of blood around her snout - had gnawed off enough of the bird's back that I could see into its ribcage.

The back garden was covered in even more feathers than the house. Who knew a bird had so many?

For some reason, I didn't want the girls discovering their beloved dog's crime so I started clearing up the mess. I picked up the bird in a plastic bag and set about scraping up the scattered feathers. After a good 30 seconds of that I decided it was a waste of time and a possible bird flu risk, so there was only one thing for it. Reach for the vacuum cleaner. An extension cable was all I needed to get the thing to the end of the garden and inside two minutes the scene of the crime was pristine clean. I even managed to hoover up some dead leaves and blossom from under the barbie. I'd forgotten the joys of the Australian leaf blower, but this came close.

This evening, Dingo still seemed to be picking feathers out of her teeth but displayed no sign of blood lust or any kind of illness one might contract from consuming the uncooked meat of aerial vermin so I think we can sweep the whole incident under the carpet - along with the few feathers that evaded my vacuum cleaner.

Fundamentalism

2008-05-03T14:19:00.000-07:00

I was just sitting down for a last news check before going to bed and i saw an interesting little brief which I translate below.

First a bit of background. May 4 is the day the Dutch commemorate their war dead with two minutes of silence, laying of wreaths etc. Staphorst and Genemuiden are villages full of crazies who adhere extremely closely to certain Biblical strictures.

These people are Calvinists with a fat red line under the capital C. They're known as black stocking villages because of the sober dress code and they take their Sunday-as-day-of-rest VERY seriously. They don't so much as hang out the washing and for some reason nor do they drive cars on the Sabbath (I just checked Genesis and God also didn't drive a car on the seventh day).

So anyway, here's the story in all its brief glory:

"Strict Christian municipalities such as Staphorst and Genemuiden have held their commemoration services this (Saturday) evening. So as not to disturb their Sunday peace, the villagers did not want to hold two minutes silence on May 4. "

You've got to love a religious group that believes two minutes of silence will disturb their peace.

Bike ride

2008-04-28T13:43:00.000-07:00

To test Esther's new bike, we went for a cycle under our favorite motorway underpass with the dog.

Oma bike

2008-04-28T13:36:00.000-07:00

Esther has a new bicycle. Sort of early birthday present due to Julia growing out of her old bike and shifting up to Esther's. Julia's old one will be sold at the girls' Queen's Day stand, along with about a metric ton of other old toys. For those of you who don't know what Queen's Day is, go back into this blog's archives to the end of April last year.

Swimming success

2008-04-28T00:20:00.000-07:00

After Esther, Julia has now taken up competitive swimming. Nervous times and much nail biting by Julia and her parents. But no problem - she came third in her first ever 25-meter breaststroke race. In her heat, she was second, a fraction of a second behind a boy who somehow had sneaked into a girl's race.

This was a little hard to swallow for Esther, who has been training hard and swimming competitions for months with about the same level of success. While she didn't win a medal, she did carve four (count 'em, four!) seconds off her personal best in the 50-meter freestyle and swam a classy 25 butterfly. I don't think I could swim 25 centimeters of butterfly, so I was very impressed.

Panning

2008-04-04T14:12:00.000-07:00

Today was one of the unbelievably frequent "teacher-free days" for Julia's class, which meant that it was also a pupil-free day for her class, which meant in turn that I got to take a day off and make sure Julia didn't burn the house down. It also meant we were both free to go see something called Pipo Hour, a Fame-like afternoon of the performing arts put on by kids whose teachers did decided to turn up at school but frankly couldn't be bothered to actually do any teaching.

Obviously, Esther's play - written and performed by Esther and two friends - was the dramatic highlight of the hour (which actually was two hours and felt a lot like three). I would try to describe it, but I don't think I could do it justice - their mission was to dramatize a Dutch saying that translates loosely as "Getting up with the chickens" and I think means getting out of bed, or going to bed- I'm not sure which - early.

I used the occasion to try my hand at a photographic technique called panning where you freeze a moving subject but render the rest of the image a blur by moving your camera with the subject.

How hard can that be? Well quite hard. The above mess is the closest I got all afternoon. In my defense, the light was very poor in Esther's gymnasium.

I may on occasions in the past have suggested that photographers are a bunch of overpaid gadget junkies whose idea of a hard day's work and creativity is sitting in the sun at the Sydney Cricket Ground pushing their right index finger up and down a few times, but it turns out some of the stuff they do is quite hard.

Brazilian

2008-04-04T13:51:00.000-07:00

We'd talked about it, of course.

Show me a couple who have been married for more than 10 years who hasn't already taken the plunge or at the very least read about it in Cosmo (in the dentist's waiting room) and wondered about the ethics of it. The Morals of it.

Anyway, this week, almost on a whim, we took the plunge.

Irmie and I got a Brazilian.

I just wish we'd done it years ago.

We're new people. Suddenly, we seem to be spending more time together.

Nothing really feels the same any more.

Suffice it to say, the bedroom is a more inviting place than it has been for some time. Going to the toilet is more fun!

If there are any new mums out there among my readership (and I secretly suspect my entire readership may be made up of two new mums - take a bow, Becky and Meraiah) this is a must for you.

All I can say is that if any of you have been mulling over taking the plunge - go ahead: Get yourselves a cleaning lady from Rio like we did. You won't regret it.

Swimming

2008-03-19T04:41:00.000-07:00

If Esther keeps up her competitive swimming career (I completely forgot to post that she won her first individual medal a couple of weeks ago - a bronze in the 25-meter breaststroke. it felt like a world title to her proud parents) I may get used to the stench of chlorine, but here at the European swimming championships in Eindhoven I'm struggling.
The Days start at 8.30 a.m. and finish at 9.30ish p.m. and I'm stuck way at the top of the stands where all the chlorinated hot air gathers.
I'm feeling pretty flabby looking at all the incredibly buff swimmers - I must have as much if not more body fat than the hundreds of swimmers competing here combined. However, I have a week to go and with very little opportunity to eat and non-stop profuse sweating, I'm hopeful my BMI will sink faster than a Ukranian who just leapt off the 10-meter diving platform.

Spring in the air

2008-03-01T05:02:00.000-08:00

It's the first day of spring here and we celebrated by welcoming this parrot into our garden.

I have a feeling these things aren't indigenous to the Netherlands, but they fly around here and The Hague in pretty significant numbers and don't seem to worry to much about cold winters. They're not rainbow lorikeets, crimson rosellas or king parrots, but I guess they're the next best thing.

Three girls and a bike

2008-02-25T11:36:00.000-08:00

Just to practice posting photos to the blog via our new computer, here's an idyllic little scene of the girls arriving home from the market on Saturday.

Julia's getting a little big for her tiny saddle behind the handlebars so this probably won't happen too many more times.
If you look carefully in the background, you can see the fourth girl I share the house with peering out of the window.

Social climbers

2008-02-17T14:05:00.000-08:00

Today we went to a party to celebrate the 65th birthdays of Irmie's mum, her mum's twin sister and the wife of one of Irmie's father's sisters.

Irmie ordered me to talk to a minimum of six people, as I have a habit of fading into the wallpaper at these events if I can. Years of high volume iPod listening have turned me half deaf and Irmie's enormous extended family mostly speak Dutch with a very pleasant but for a semi-deaf Englishman/Australian mostly unintelligable accent.

While I was tucking into a fine lunch and striking up conversations with people who probably wondered who on earth I was, Esther and Julia along with the other kids got to have a go at climbing. They were naturals, both reaching heights that made my knees shake just watching them and only stopping when the next handhold was physically impossible to reach.

Barbie on ice

2008-02-17T13:51:00.000-08:00

There comes a point each winter when you just HAVE to throw soe bleeding meat on the barbie. I hit the wall on Saturday.

Before getting down to grilling, I first had to scrape the ice off the barbie's cover and then wash/scrape off or generally ignore five months worth of accumulated mould.

The steaks tasted perfect and my hands have already thawed out.

Lice to be back

2008-02-17T13:06:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since my last blog. There's a simple reason: head lice.

Early evenings in the Corder house these days resemble a David Attenbrough documentary about western lowland gorillas. I sit combing and picking at, Julia's hair while Irmie does the same for Esther. The only difference between us and apes is that we don't eat the bugs when we find them - although it has been seriously that I ought to bite the lice eggs (I believe these are called nits, if you're interested) to kill them.
Late last year I was appointed a lice father at Esther and Julia's school. It was a rare honor and recognition of my years of careful preening regimen. What it means is that I go once a month and do the gorilla head picking thing in Julia's class while the teacher and kids go about their work as if there's nothing going on.
My one reservation at taking the job was that I'd never actually seen a lice or one of its eggs and wasn't sure I'd be able to recognize one even if it jumped off a head and bit me.
Now I can only look back wistfully at those days of innocence.
The most unpleasant fact of this story is that the first I knew of our little infestation issue was when I casually scratched MY head and discovered a little bug dusting itself off as it clambered out form under my fingernail. I briefly tried to talk myself into believing that this was some sort of mutant dandruff. But of course then you start looking back at the fact that Esther and Julia had been scratching their scalps a lot over the previous few weeks and it all falls into place.
I wanted to immediately douse everybody in the house in agent orange, but instead Irmie went to the chemist and came back with some kind of natural remedy shampoo and a couple of fine-tooth combs.
We tried this and of course the lice just put on their shower caps and came out gleaming like new but not in the least dead. Fortunately, there were once lice in Esther's class in Beecroft and we had protectively nuked her with a savage shampoo bought over the counter of a Sydney chemist.
This stuff clearly meant business. While the Dutch lotion had pictures of smiling children on the bottle, its Australian big brother was covered in warnings about not drinking it, getting it in the eyes or allowing it to drip onto the enamel of your bathtub for more than five seconds. It wasn't actually napalm, but I don't think it was a very distant relative.
Anyway it appeared to get the job done. I have had no recurrence of my infestation and Irmie and Esther also appear to be bug free. But as I was cleaning Julia's teeth a few nights ago she peered into the mirror, said "Look," and picked one out of her hair.
The problem, you see, is the eggs (nits). I must have picked out about 100 of the tiny rugby ball shaped things, but they cling to the hair and only one needs to survive the Australian poison rinse for a new cycle of critters to be unleashed.
As I write, we appear to be free and can erase the black cross daubed on our front door. But it only takes one nit..
Anybody's scalp itching?

Happy New Year

2007-12-31T10:57:00.000-08:00

Here's wishing you all a happy, healthy, eventful 2008.

Christmas

2007-12-25T13:28:00.000-08:00

0010: Santa's little helper delivers modest contents of Esther and Julia's stockings. The children do not stir. Julia will later claim to have heard a loud stomping on the roof.
0600: Esther gets up, visits toilet and is told to get back to bed.
0700: Julia gets up and is told to get back to bed until 7:30 at the absolute earliest. To her credit she returns to bed without making scene.
0715: Julia gets up again. Hops into bed with parents.
0730: Julia gets stocking and begins eating chocolate.
0800: Esther gets up and begins eating chocolate.
0815: Dog throws up. It is not clear how much chocolate it has eaten.
0900: Breakfast. Boiled eggs and toast.
0930: Opening of Christmas presents. I won't bore you with details, but everybody appeared satisfied with their haul. Bear in mind that this is the second-St. Nicholas-themed day of the month and therefore second round of presents.
1015: Julia begins complaining mildly of stomach ache. She is ignored.
1045: Julia throws up stoically in and around the downstairs toilet.
1055: Bread sauce I abandoned for mopping duty burns to bottom of pan.
1115: After shower and hairwash, color returns to Julia's previously palid face.
1200: Cooking continues. Remains of bread sauce are salvaged. They have a not unpleasant (to my mind) charcoaly undertone.
1230: I begin ignoring nagging feeling I may have contracted whatever caused Julia to puke. I start drinking.
1300: Irmie slumps into chair grasping belly.
At this point, the day could have degenerated into a vomitfest, but instead Irmie's family arrived and all went extremely well. Children played without fighting; the dog did not make off with the ham; food was good and wine excellent. Nobody threw up. What more can you ask from a Christmas Day?
As I put Esther to bed, I asked her if she'd enjoyed the day and she said, "Yes, but your bread sauce wasn't as good as usual."
2355: Julia throws up.

Not getting any warmer

2007-12-22T03:20:00.000-08:00

Without wanting to belabor the point, it's still pretty damn cold here and the frost on the trees just keeps getting prettier. Today we have blue skies and sun to go along with the ice. We're going skating this afternoon.

Not getting any warmer

2007-12-21T01:45:00.000-08:00

It's still cold. Sadly, it doesn't sound like it's going to stay like this until Christmas. Forecasters say it will be back to less cold and much more wet.
It makes your toes shrivel up and your face ache to be outside, but it's just too pretty not to go wander around in this weather. It even snowed a tiny bit this morning allowing Dingo her first taste of the white stuff. She left an odd trail of little paw prints next to big tongue prints all the way down our street.

Cold

2007-12-20T00:36:00.000-08:00

It's cold here.
If we hadn't sold our ice skates eight years ago, we'd be strongly considering getting them out of the fat - as the Dutch say. Apparently slapping grease on the blades stops them rusting in the decades between decent cold winters here. You may not be able to see it, but that this black swan that has strayed way too far from Perth actually has ice coating its tail feathers.
This is the park next to our street in all its wintery glory. Sadly, the forecast is for this weather only to last through to Saturday so a white Christmas is not going to happen.

Election day

2007-11-23T14:23:00.000-08:00

While news agency photographers in Sydney were no doubt wandering down to Bondi to shoot lifesavers voting in their budgiesmugglers, I hauled on my wet weather gear, jumped on the bicycle and pedalled across town to the Australian embassy where I was able to do my civic duty and vote the Coalition out of office.
I've been following the polls pretty closely and it looks like the end of Howard, but I fear my local member, Phillip Ruddock, is safe in Berowra. If he does get kicked out, I think I'll fly over and celebrate myself.
I always seem to miss these generational changes in political leadership - I was in Amsterdam when Tony Blair finally kicked the Tories out of office in and now I'm on the wrong side of the world when Howard gets what's been coming to him for the last two elections.
Does this mean Peter Garrett becomes a Cabinet minister? How cool is that?

Us

2007-11-05T02:36:00.000-08:00

For those of you who've forgotten what we look like. Here's a picture of the handsome Corder family.

Saturday hockey victories

2007-11-03T06:42:00.000-07:00

For the first time, both Esther and Julia played hockey this morning and they both won. Esther's team had taken a few nasty beatings while I was in France for the rugby, but had started fighting back by the time I got home and the first time I watched them they lost 2-1 thanks to a goal deep in injury time despite the fact that nobody had been injured. Referee's watch stopped. Scandal. Letters to the Royal Dutch Hockey Union. Sadly the score stood.
However, today they put that disappointment behind them with a 7-0 (or 8-0, you kind of lose count) victory over Leiden and Oesgeest. Esther grabbed a first-half hat-trick (while I was watching Julia) and added two more after the break by which time I'd arrived.

Meanwhile, Julia had marked her first competitive match with four goals in a 10-3(ish) win over Ypenburg on a very fancy water-based pitch.
Tears of pride and joy were very nearly shed on the sidelines of both pitches.

2007-11-03T06:34:00.000-07:00

Near complete kitchen

2007-10-26T15:07:00.000-07:00

So here it is. Near as damn it finished. The only thing missing is a second shelf supposed to be above the lone shelf now hanging above the sink. It was broken so a new one is coming next week. At the moment, we just have what look like three bullet holes in the wall where it should be.
However, we do now have a gas stove with four working gas things (what are they called? burners?) instead of three and we no longer need matches to light them.
We have an oven with all its knobs - our previous oven had lost two knobs so had to be turned on using a wrench and you had to guess how hot the oven was going to be by turning a little metal stalk where the knob used to be all the way clockwise and then twiddling it backwards.
We also have an extractor fan that actually extracts fumes, though it remains unclear exactly where it extracts them to. My guess is the neighbors' attic, but they haven't complained yet.
We have a fridge with a door that closes, which has to be a good thing for food quality and should shrink our carbon footprint by a couple of sizes.
We also have this machine - the small second tap on the left in the picture - which delivers boiling water whenever you want it. It's very cool. When you want a cup of tea, you just fill the cup direct from the tap and dunk your tea bag. Same thing when you need to boil pasta or vegetables. The kettle has been mothballed and the children given asbestos gloves and canisters of spray-on skin.
I'll say this just once, because I hate to harp on about it: We have a dishwasher.
You know those images of Victorian families assembled around a piano or harpsichord singing songs together to amuse themselves? That was what we were like on the first night we got to turn it on. We each ceremonially deposited our soiled dishes in the racks then turned it on and just stood listening to its gentle hum. It was like little angels were inside licking our plates clean.

Commie crooner

2007-10-26T04:48:00.001-07:00

In an unprecedented step for this blog, I've decided to add a link to somebody else's site, namely that of Jose Maria Sison, leader of the Philippine Communist Party, who lives in exile in Utrecht. While he's not writing commie propaganda for the comrades back home, he appears to have a part time job as a wedding singer. I give you his rendition of My Way, tweaked slightly for his supporters. I hope it works. If not, go to his Web site josemariasison.org and dig through until you find Mao's Way.
http://www.josemariasison.org/jumi02/sightsandsounds/Music&Poetry/jmspopsongs/11_mao_s_way.mp3

Kitchen chaos

2007-10-19T03:29:00.000-07:00

We have no kitchen at the moment. Or, to be more precise, we have two kitchens: our old one which is in the front garden, the back garden and the conservatory, then we have a new kitchen which is stacked up in our dining room. All we have in the room formerly known as the kitchen is dust. Lots of dust.
Irmie started the process of removing the kitchen by chipping away tiles while I was in France. I got involved on my return and last weekend the menfolk from Irmie's DIY-proficient family came to complete the job.
Our builder was supposed to come on Tuesday to prepare the space for installation of the new kitchen. He arrived Thursday.
He's drilling as I type, driving our snotty anti-noise neighbor out of her home and creating billowing clouds of gritty dust that have turned the curtains, table, fruit bowl and dog grey.
He'll be back tomorrow with a plasterer and hopefully on Monday can begin putting up cupboards and plumbing in the dishwasher, a process expected to take three days that will finally end more than a year of cruel and unusual punishment in the Corder household: having to do the washing up. All the dust will have been worthwhile.

Paris

2007-10-02T15:03:00.000-07:00

I just got back from France, where I was covering the opening round of the Rugby World Cup. It’s tough work, but somebody has to do it. I got to watch all of England’s games, which wasn’t nearly as entertaining as it was back in 2003. More importantly, I watched Fiji beat Wales in what has to be one of the greatest rugby games of all time. 38-34, if my memory serves me correctly.
The game was in Nantes, near the Atlantic coast. I got a train there in the morning, had an excellent lunch in an odd little restaurant that somehow tastefully fused Chinese and classic French cooking. I started with spring rolls filled with confit of duck, followed it with sensational fish soup, washed down with a couple of glasses of local sauvignon blanc and rounded off by a runny chocolate pudding and a sort of very thin custard. I lumbered onto a tram to the stadium and tried to stay awake for the game.
Somehow, the trip for me revolved around good and bad meals and quite a few match days with no meals at all.
Far and away the worst food was the first meal out I had – a sausage called an andouillette, which not only looked like a deep-fried turd, but also smelled and (I’m guessing here) tasted like one. It was in Lens, the ugliest city in all of France, and I was surrounded by lagered-up England fans. It really could not have been any nastier.
An andouillette is a sausage made of rubbery intestines not so much stuffed as coiled into a length of slightly less rubbery intestine. So when you cut into it, the gristle kind of springs out at you, preceded by the stench of an ill-cleaned abattoir. I pride myself on having a reasonably strong constitution, but this particular snag floored me. I actually gagged while trying to eat it. The idea of an offal sausage was sold to me by the French photographers I was dining with and, in my defense, they all ordered one too and none of them could eat theirs either. I guess we just got bad ones, though having been through this lunchtime from hell, I’m not convinced there’s such a thing as a good andouillette. Well, I’ve just googled it and Wikipedia tells me it’s made out of a pig’s COLON and stomach. The Internet can be a terrible thing.
I couldn’t eat another thing for two days and my misery was compounded by having to watch England struggle to beat the United States.
Still, it wasn’t all bad. I spent most of the time in a small hotel just off the swanky Rue Faubourg St Honore and ran off the food and drink by jogging along the Champs Elysee and through a park called Les Tuileries to the Louvre, crossing the Seine and cutting back between two buildings called the Big Palace and the Small Palace (the small one is pictured above and really isn’t very small at all). You can imagine why the downtrodden masses started offing aristocrats’ heads in Paris, I’ve never seen so many pompous buildings topped with gilt statues of women exposing their breasts in one place. If I were living below the breadline and the toffs ruling my country were spending their time building ridiculous palaces and powdering their wigs, I’d get pretty pissed off too. Oddly, both the big and small palace were built after the revolution. Some people never learn.
A couple of quick observations about the French while I remember them: They really do say “Ooh la la.” Particularly rugby commentators. I never heard anybody say “sacre bleu,” but I might not have been listening well enough. French drivers are either the best or the worst in the world. I can’t work out which. In the narrow street I was staying in, cars were always parked so close together that I couldn’t shuffle sideways between them. I have no idea how they get into or out of the spaces. I’d need a crane. Then there’s the experience of driving around the Arc de Triomphe. Much funnier writers than me have described it, I’ll just say it was very, very frightening. I think an aerial view would have the Arc as a queen bee and all the cars spinning around her like crazed drones.They have odd shops in Paris. I think this was probably a product of the posh neighborhood I was staying in, but a random sampling of stores included one selling shoe laces, another selling nail clippers. Just nail clippers. Another appeared to be selling showroom dummies, which was kind of surreal. And there were shops selling fur coats. I’m sure that anywhere else in the world these would be surrounded by armed guards and steel shutters. One shop had a few bars on the windows, but my impression was that they were there to keep out light-fingered ladies looking to make off with a mink, rather than Peta activists and their buckets of red paint.The French smoke more than any nationality I know of with the possible exception of the Indonesians. I sat in a restaurant in Bordeaux and a woman sitting behind me appeared to be taking drags of her Gaulois between mouthfuls of food. I stayed in Bordeaux a couple of days and over two nights out, I must have eaten every piece of a duck apart from the beak. In one restaurant I asked the waitress what a certain dish meant and she replied: “The inside bits of a duck.” Despite my andouillette nightmare, I took the plunge and it was fantastic. Little bits of heart and other internal organs braised in duck fat and served with a slightly sweet wine vinegar dressing.To close, I’ll also just state for the record that, apart from the night desk supervisor in my hotel, Parisians appeared far more polite and pleasant than their reputation would have you believe. After England’s triumphant humiliation of Tonga (36-20) at the Parc des Princes, I missed the last metro home and had to battle with hundreds of pissed fans trying to hail a cab. I finally walked down a side street and managed to get one. I told the driver to get me away from all the drunks as fast as he could, but instead he immediately pulled over and asked me if I minded sharing. What the hell, I thought. I’ve been at the World Cup for nearly four weeks – one cab ride with a bunch of drunks can’t hurt. But actually the driver had seen a bloke my age with his overweight dad who was staggering not because of too much Heineken but some nasty leg injury that required him to use a cane. The driver said he couldn’t let the bloke hobble around the streets of Paris at 2:30 a.m. and who was I to disagree. I was rewarded when, as we drove along the Seine, the son looked out of the window at the Eiffel Tower and asked, (really) Is that the Eiffel Tower?

2:30

2007-09-03T02:24:00.001-07:00

I’ve always suspected that when I take my car to the garage for a service or to have something fixed that the mechanics covertly install some kind of device that makes something else go wrong about two weeks later.
But who’d have thought that a dentist would do it too?
Shortly before going to France on holiday, I went to the dentist. It was my second visit in about eight years – I’m not a big fan of the process.
She told me I had to have a filling replaced. Said it was leaking, whatever that means.
She replaced the filling, but managed to make the new one way too big. As a result, the tooth above it started hurting in France. I went back to the dentist when we got home and she chiseled away a couple of centimeters of excess filling – and billed me for the pleasure! – but it still wasn’t enough. My teeth hurt just as much, if not more.
Back again, more filling chipped off until finally I felt like I could actually close my mouth.
But the pain’s still there today, centered in one of my wisdom teeth but spreading to pretty much the whole right side of my face, and this is just two days before I go to Paris – the world capital of eating well.
Pretty much the only thing I can swallow are handfuls of pain killers.
Garcon, could I have those snails and frogs legs pureed please? That's going to ingratiate me to Parisian restaurateurs.
I have one final trip back to the dentist tomorrow afternoon and if it’s not fixed then, it’s Nurofen on my croissant every morning.

No puppies

2007-08-20T14:30:00.000-07:00

You'd look like this too if somebody had just removed your ovaries without asking.

Hols IV

2007-08-20T14:26:00.000-07:00

Langres Cathedral.
Last stop was Langres, halfway between the Alps and Voorburg where we pitched camp for a nights to break up the journey. I'd never heard of Langres, but it was a beautiful walled town with an old church and streets and streets of amazingly preserved old houses. It was so picturesque even Esther and Julia didn't whinge as we dragged them around the place.

Julia's Velvet Underground moment.
It was all so unspoiled and timeless, that all the pictures I took that day somehow look better in black and white.
Somebody even parked an old Citroen in this street to add a bit of atmosphere.
And then it was done. We had our last meal in France in an Italian restaurant, saw rain clouds looming, broke camp and made a six-hour dash through northern France, Luxembourg, Belgium and home. When I found my motorbike was still parked where I left it chained to the house, my holiday joy was complete.

Hols III

2007-08-20T14:17:00.000-07:00

All hail the Alpine weather.
For those of you interested in continuity and who haven't read the blog for a while, I'd suggest scrolling down a couple of posts and then returning here.
After moving mum into her new house, we headed across country and uphill to my brother Will's new chalet, which he bought with soon-to-be-wife Alex near Les Deux Alpes. We stayed there for three nights enjoying fine food, learning to play poker and wandering around the mountains.

The ski lift in Venosc, gateway to the real mountains.
One day we all boarded a nasty ski lift to head up to Les Deux Alpes where you can ski all year around if you want to take an hour long cable car odyssey to a glacier, which the girls did. I stayed at the base with Will and his soon-to-be-brother-in-law Ben and played golf. Much more civilized, particularly after my chip in birdie on the fourth.

Pining for some decent weather.
While we were at Will's - and just before we went camping at a site down the road - we had the immense pleasure of watching a fantastic hail storm batter the valley they live in causing only minor flooding to Will and Alex's basement. The picture at the top of this post shows their deck littered with hail stones that undoubtedly would have punched straight through our tent had we been sleeping in it. As it was, the girls hit the hot tub on the deck just until the lightning started, at which point they beat a hasty retreat. The more sensible among us stayed inside drinking beer and contemplating just how much fun the storm would have been under canvas.

Will and Alex's place.

Hols I

2007-08-17T15:37:00.000-07:00

In the clouds in the Vosges.

So, we’re back from France after tooling around the country visiting my mother and brother, getting wet, sunburned, frozen and windswept, being treated like royalty and like shit by the French.
Getting to France from The Hague is an entertaining process Australians on your island continent can only dream about.
If you leave early and don’t get held up every two miles by a Dutch sleurhut (see earlier post for translation) attempting to overtake a truck doing 80kmh uphill (good luck avoiding that happening to you), you can hit France for lunch and rack up your fourth country in as many hours after the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. I’ve spent longer than that in queues to check in at Sydney airport.
We lunched at a roadside service station in Luxembourg where thousands of penny-pinching Dutch drivers were queuing up for hours to save a few euros on their fuel bills thanks to low Luxembourg tax. My guess is that if you leave your engine running while sitting in the pre-petrol pump traffic jam your idling engine wastes more money than you earn from the cheap fuel.
For our first ever trip with pooch, those helpful Luxemburgers had fenced off a dog dunny and even more helpfully, they put the picnic tables right next to it, so we could watch dogs crapping and smell the turds while we ate.
As well as our first trip with dog, it was also the first European excursion for our satellite navigation system nicknamed Rob in honor of AP Sydney photographer Rob Griffith, a lover of all gadgets and early advocate of the technology. We even managed to program the thing to talk to us in an Australian accent.

I know we pitched the tent around here somewhere...

I don’t want this to sound like an advert (unless somebody at Tom Tom wants to pay me wads of cash), but the thing was a small miracle. To get to our first stop, a tiny campsite near the mountain village of Gerardmer in the Vosges, it directed us across country and up roads that were barely more than goat tracks, bringing us unerringly to the forest clearing and its bustling population of Dutch campers (if you are having trouble being plagued by Dutch people all over the world and want to escape, I suggest you visit the Netherlands in July or August. The place is empty).Let’s draw a veil over the Vosges (pretty though it is in a pine-clad, rolling hills kind of way). It rained. We left the tent windows rolled up. Our stuff got wet.We packed up the tent the following morning in pouring rain with kids steaming in the car. The rain stopped the very second we closed the door to drive away but Esther and Julia still had their first experience of driving through clouds rather than under them.We then plowed south under gray skies – even the sunflowers in fields along the way seemed embarrassed and gazed at the shoes in the absence of any sun to turn their faces towards.

Hols II

2007-08-17T15:25:00.000-07:00

The Ibie.

Next stop was the Ardeche, where we had eight days of the kind of beautiful weather that could have even transformed me into an avid camper had it not been for the three French families who shoehorned their tents onto the pitch next to ours at a beautiful, supposedly quiet, little camping a la ferme. They must have had a dozen kids between them and they screamed every hour on the hour throughout the night. They (the barely-old-enough-to- walk kids) went to bed a couple of hours after us and got up a couple of hours before we wanted to be awake and got progressively more tired and cranky the longer they stayed.
But generally our stay was great, we basked next to a river called the Ibie where generations of Corders have swum and sunned themselves amid the scent of wild thyme mixed with lavender.

Mum's new house - the one on the right with the blue shutters.

We also helped mum move into her new house despite the fact that it had no electricity, running water or a kitchen. Even the pool wasn’t finished. The deprivation of it all.Helping move gave me one of the great moments of the holiday. Lugging furniture around one day it felt like the entire male population of mum’s tiny village spontaneously turned out to help - even the little man with battered cap, scuffed dress shoes under his shorts and the same self-rolled cigarette that has been hanging off his bottom lip for the 25 years I’ve seen him around. After we shifted mum’s furniture, we all went to her neighbor’s garden for a midday Pastis. It was about as quintessentially French as a bloke in a striped shirt with strings of garlic slung around his neck.This idyllic scene was offset by the unbelievable snottiness of a waitress in a restaurant in Vallon, the town closest to mum’s house and one which relies on tourism for its survival. On Esther’s birthday all she wanted in the evening was to go out for an omelet in town. We went to a nice restaurant which had omelet on the menu. Trouble was it turned out to be the lunch menu and this waitress refused to have the kitchen cook the birthday girl one in the evening. It suppose it could happen anywhere, but the French do seem to have a bit of a reputation for this kind of thing.It’s getting late so that’s going to have to do for now. More later.

Herring update

2007-06-14T13:37:00.000-07:00

About the herring.
I decided that writing off one of the Netherlands' only culinary delicacies on the basis of one example was probably a little hasty.
So I had another one.
This time, it was a smaller bit and had been scraped of all but one stringy bone which I easily managed to dislodge from between my front teeth.
And this one tasted good. Same texture without the mass of bones was nice and the taste was a little less, how can I put this? Rancid and a little more fishy. It had fewer onions on it too. Maybe that helped.
Anyway, it seems that Saturday's abomination was probably caused by eating a herring from the wrong fishmonger (I still get sick looking at the picture of the man's foul hands cutting the herring on his gore-smeared table) on the wrong day, at the wrong time of day (4 p.m. What was I thinking?)
The one I had on Tuesday was served on its own little piece of toast as a canape at a reception for delegates at an international conference in The Hague.

Fishy tale

2007-06-09T14:15:00.000-07:00

The things I do for this blog.
Today I put my life on the line to bring to you a true taste of the Netherlands – raw herring.
None of your effete Scandinavian pickling involved in the preparation of this snack, just the grease-smeared, liver-spotted hands of the fishmonger who’d been slicing and scraping these babies all day.
The process is pretty simple; catch the herring while it’s young, bring it to shore and sell to a fishmonger who – in front of your eyes! - cuts off its head, skins it, disembowels it, scrapes out the bones (leaving half of the little ones in so the consumer can pick them out from between his teeth for the rest of the day) and serves it covered in diced raw onion on a paper plate.
I can almost hear your mouths watering.
You will notice from the above the total absence of the words “cook it.”
But sashimi it isn’t.
When I’d bought mine and finished gagging at the sight of (A) the fishmonger’s rancid fingers and (B) the fish guts being scraped into a hole in his cutting table – along with the guts of every other fish he’d prepared that day (and I bought mine at 4:30 p.m. on the busiest herring eating day of the year), I took it outside to eat.
Julia looked at it and asked, “Is it still alive?”
I assured her that it was indeed very much an ex-herring and she agreed to pose with it.
Let’s get something clear here: I really wanted to enjoy the herring.
There are many things about Dutch cooking that are worthy of my scorn - people, fruit does NOT belong in every course of every meal! Apple sauce is a baby food, not a condiment. Absolutely true meal I’ve eaten: minced beef decked with mashed potato, pickled cabbage and BANANA.
But the herring embodies many things I like about food – it’s local produce, not pumped full of growth hormones, simply (possibly a little too simply, how hard would it be for the fishmonger to wash his hands between fish?) prepared and, once you’ve scraped the raw onions off, not spoiled by other ingredients.
Today was the first day of the new herring season and this year’s fish have received rave reviews. Buttery texture, salty (duh, it’s a fish) taste, lean meat etc, etc.
Of course, the new fish get good reviews each year because they’re generally written by spokespeople for the herring fleet.
When you get your herring it is basically two fillets held together by the tail. You eat them by clutching the tail between thumb and forefinger and lowering the thing into your mouth. It’s somehow reminds me of Tom and Jerry cartoons.
So anyway, I didn’t enjoy it.
The meat was a nice texture but it still had bones in – not choke you bones but these little stringy bits of cartilage that get wedged between your teeth and stay there until your next visit to the dentist.
I remember Sydney rock oysters and blue fin tuna sashimi tasting like the sparkly blue Pacific. This herring tasted of the North Sea.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve genuinely felt like throwing up after eating something. I battled through half of it before binning the rest. I noticed several other half-eaten herring sticking out of the overflowing bin outside the fish shop.
Julia and I dashed to the deli counter of the nearby supermarket where they have plates of little free food samples. I stuffed myself with something called pizza mince which I would have given a very, very wide berth to under any other circumstances, then had a cracker smeared in filet American which is basically raw mince and rounded it off with some actually nice French sheep’s cheese.
This combined assault on the taste buds still failed to cleanse my mouth of the foul fish taste. I bought some industrial strength chewing gum at the checkout, crammed the entire packet into my mouth at once and fled for home.
It’s now seven hours, three liters of water, two meals and a magnum of red wine later and I can still taste the little bastard.

Shades of gray

2007-05-29T14:40:00.000-07:00

Camping. I think my opinions on this pastime are reasonably well-known. Even in Australia, where most camp sites haven’t seen rain for 25 years, I think it’s a silly thing to do. If humans were meant to camp, we wouldn’t have been fitted with brains capable of developing flint axe heads and five-star hotels.
However, I am in the minority in our household so on Saturday morning we stuffed the boot of the car with our gear and headed to Texel, an island just off the coast of the northern Netherlands, to spend a long weekend with friends.
A car ferry takes you to the island, though I suspect if you rolled up your trousers you could probably wade there without getting your knees wet.
The crossing is short - no sooner have you clambered up the stairs to the top deck of the ferry to feed the gulls swirling in its wake than you have to start heading down to the car again. There wasn’t even enough time for Irmie to get seasick.

Texel seems to crouch in the North Sea. The legs of the sheep there are a few inches shorter than those of their mainland cousins and I’m told the meat of the island’s lambs is extra tender because they never walk anywhere _ they spend their whole short lives hunkered down behind dikes or sand dunes trying to escape the wind that relentlessly lashes the coast. They are reputed to be pre-salted by the sea spray.When you see a flock, you notice that all the animals point their arses towards the wind. Farmers’ barns that dot the landscape do the same thing, directing their pointy ends into the prevailing wind. The barns are odd – they look like they’ve been sawn in half (see Irmie’s pic). I assume that the design is intended to give a bit of shelter from the wind for farmers and their sheep. Also, if you turned them 180 degrees you probably wouldn’t be able to get the doors open on a windy day.
All of that said, we set up camp in a beautiful spot surrounded and sheltered by low, pine-clad sand dunes and there wasn’t so much as a light breeze to disturb the tents (or to dry them out when they leaked.)
I’m not going to bore you all with a blow by blow account of the weekend. Suffice to say our tent did leak catastrophically on night one. We stayed dry, but all of our clothes were soaked through. Our fellow campers were sympathetic but seemed unsurprised that we were the ones who got drenched. We’ve had our tent two years in Australia and never had a problem. First night under the Dutch skies and it’s like the Poseidon Adventure in there.
On the first day we glimpsed tiny slithers of blue sky through breaks in the cloud and the kids (there were seven of them and two dogs) even went swimming in the camp site’s pool.
Nobody suggested going to the beach for a dip in the churning sewer-brown waters of the North Sea.
Walking through the dunes was beautiful – though too wet for me to take my camera, so you’ll have to take my word for it. The rolling hills were covered in gorse and the occasional stand of stunted trees. I actually saw wild horses and wild cattle. In the Netherlands! If a wild horse wandered anywhere else in this country somebody would immediately shoot it and build 16 houses on the patch of ground it had occupied.
By the end of Saturday, the sky had clouded over completely and we never saw the sun again. I never knew there were so many different shades of gray, but we’d seen them all by the time we left on Monday.
Fortunately, Justine, whose father has a caravan stationed permanently on the island, knew of a fine bar on the beach which served a local brew called Schuumkoppe, which loosely translates as Scum Head, though the brewery’s marketing department might offer a more appetizing alternative. Anyway, it was a fine pint for a blustery Saturday and Sunday afternoon. We used it to wash down a Dutch delicacy called bitter balls. The less I write about them, the better.
Justine’s father is currently engaged in a legal battle with the Mafiosi who run all of Texel’s camp sites. He has been banned from using his caravan because he built a shed a meter away from it instead of actually up against it. This is despite the fact that the same officious dickheads who have blackballed him gave him permission to build the shed where it stands. The case reinforces much of what I think about Dutch bureaucracy gone wild. Of course, I have only heard Justine and her father’s side of the story. For all I know he was running the caravan as a noisy brothel and gambling den – though, this being the Netherlands, that certainly wouldn’t be enough to have him kicked off the site.

Fuut and emu chick

2007-05-21T07:28:00.000-07:00

This thing's called a fuut in Dutch. I don't know what they're called in English, but my guess would be a Great Crested Grebe. Now that I write the word grebe it looks and sounds so absurd I can't imagine anybody would call anything a grebe, but there you are.
A quick Internet search has confirmed that it is indeed a GCG.
If you click on the picture it should enlarge and you can see an emu chick sitting on its back. Not sure how it got there.
This family was paddling along a canal around the corner from our house where I take the dog for walks.
It's a pretty Darwinian stretch of water. For the last few weeks, ducks grebes and other water birds have been hatching their chicks and proudly paddling around showing off the new brood.
One day you see a duck with about 14 chicks bobbing it its wake and a couple of days later you count again and there are only 11 or so. A week later, there are about six. The chicks are under fire from above and below.
Herons prowl the river banks at this time of year. They usually dine on fish and frogs, but they apparently love the taste of newborn chicks too. Added to that, you sometimes get pike swimming in the rivers and rising from the murky depths like the shark in the iconic Jaws poster to grab the chicks. I saw this happen once and it's an alarming thing: Chick tootling along, quick splash, chick gone, ripples spread, mother duck looks around before shrugging her shoulders and herding the remaining family somewhere she perceives as slightly more safe. Bubbles pop on surface of water releasing sound of pike after-dinner burp.
A new risk, albeit a very small one, has emerged in the shape of Dingo who loves chasing birds. However, despite an elaborate hunting technique involving crouching on three legs to spy on possible prey and then crawling almost on his belly towards them (think lions stalking zebra in a David Attenbrough documentary), he always times his run just as the birds take off (in the case of pigeons) or hop into the canal (ducks, grebes etc) instead of slightly earlier.

New phrase

2007-05-13T15:02:00.000-07:00

Today I introduce you, at least the non-Dutch speakers among you, to a new phrase: “Zonder blik of bloos.”
Literally translated, “without a look or a blush,” English equivalent is something like “without so much as a by your leave” though when I look at that phrase, I’m not sure it even exists.
Anyway, I hope the meaning will become apparent and I invite you all to insert the phrase in the true story recounted below.
Before we get to it, and without wanting to hype it because it wasn’t THAT big a deal, I recall that when we first got to Australia in 1999, driving along Lane Cove Road into central Sydney, Irmie was amazed by the long and orderly lines of people standing at bus stops. She couldn’t believe that anybody in their right mind would willingly turn up at a bus stop and politely wait their turn to get on. If you’ve ever tried to battle your way out of a Dutch train swimming hopelessly against the tide of humanity attempting to get in, you’ll know why this was such a shock to her system.
So here’s my latest whinge.
On Friday, I had to take Esther to the doctor – she’s been crook for a while, going from one bug to the other; when snot wasn’t pouring out of her nose or ears, she was throwing up. Generally she was miserable and irritable and that made us all miserable and irritable. So off to the doc to enquire if there might be some underlying reason why a perfectly fit and healthy child keeps getting sick. The doctor, who appeared to be at least 20 years younger than me, made it clear she didn’t know why I was wasting her valuable time with such a question. She prodded and poked Esther, said she looked pretty damn fit and healthy to her and finally as a way to get me out of her office (presumably so she could play with Barbies, or whatever girls of her age do) she told me to take Esther to the hospital next door for some blood tests.
When we got inside (Esther already whimpering in anticipation of the needle), a thin woman was standing behind the counter dealing with another patient.
The counter had one of those little things from which you pull a number so you know when it’s your turn. The number on the reel was 36; the number on the screen was 35. There was nobody else anywhere near the counter. I thought I’d do my bit to combat Amazon deforestation and not pluck a number and instead just wait there (like a commuter waiting for a Sydney bus) until it was my turn.
From nowhere, a woman elbowed past Esther and me and (alright, I’ll give you a clue – here’s where you insert the phrase) TOOK THE NUMBER 36 and went and sat down!
The more observant among you may have noticed that I don’t often unleash the old exclamation mark, but there it is.
My astonishment turned to horror when the (how can I say this politely?) scrawny bitch behind the counter finished with the patient she was dealing with, looked through me and pressed the button under the counter that let off a ping and clicked the number board to 36! The woman with the number strolled past me (you may insert the new phrase here again if you want) and attended to her blood letting business. I’m not a vengeful person, but I hope she got a particularly persistent strain of hepatitis.

Hammock sandwich

2007-05-13T14:52:00.000-07:00

Buying the parasol I mentioned in a posting a couple of weeks ago broke the drought that had gripped the Netherlands for a full four weeks. It's rained more or less non-stop ever since. However, this morning there was a break in the clouds and I decided to dust off and hang up our hammock.
The picture is intended as a little light relief as a reward for getting through my rant above (and I'm feeling very pleased with myself for finally remembering to file this post first so it's under the one above - if you know what I mean...).

Handy hints

2007-05-03T06:32:00.000-07:00

The book of 1,000 housewife’s tips I picked up on Queen’s Day is a goldmine of sound advice.
Here are a few of my favorite. And I swear to you they’re all direct translations.
-Velvet hats (and I know there are many of you out there with velvet hats) can be cleaned by rubbing them with a piece of dry bread. Marks on the edges can be removed with a cloth soaked in petrol.
-Get rid of insects and fleas on your animals by giving them a firm brushing with water you’ve boiled potatoes in.
-You can treat wood worm holes by filling them with petrol and sealing them shut with bee wax.
-Protect your fruit juice from mould by covering it in a thin layer of paraffin.
Hang on, I’m spotting a pattern here. I’m just going to check see if Shell is sponsoring this fine publication. No, apparently not, though it does say the list was put together with the cooperation of countless experts.
-Drive away rats by smearing tar over the holes they use to get into your house.
-Cigar ash is very fine. It doesn’t scratch metal and is ideal for cleaning windows and mirrors.
Remember this handy tip next time you go to a restaurant and suspect the sommelier is ripping you off: -You can find out if your red wine has been falsified like this - Allow a porcelain plate to float on a bowl of hot water and pour in some wine. Falsified wine will leave a bright red ring behind while genuine wine gives a dark brown ring.
And finally, for all you housewives who like a sip of gin while you’re smearing tar on rat holes: Alcohol, nicotine and caffeine cause arousal of your nervous system. The less often you take them the more sensitive you remain to their salutary effects _ and (pay attention here) the more you limit their inevitable damaging effects.
I’m thinking that it could be very damaging indeed if you decide to light up a cigarette while you’re cleaning your velvet hat with a petrol-soaked cloth.
That’s it for now, but don’t think I won’t be dipping into this treasure trove of petroleum-soaked tips on a regular basis and sharing them with you.

Queen's Day

2007-04-30T15:11:00.000-07:00

Today is Queen’s Day, when the Dutch celebrate the birthday of former Queen Juliana, mother of present Queen Beatrix.
For reasons that have always eluded me the day is marked by everybody clearing out their attics of junk, piling it up on a blanket outside their home or in a shopping street and hawking it to passers-by.
Effectively it’s a nationwide garage/jumble sale and we were on the wrong end of it this year.
After our move, we have vast piles of stuff we either don’t need (surfboards? You know my opinion of the North Sea), can’t use (golf clubs? Three words to describe Dutch golf courses: expensive and boring), or have no place to store (golf clubs and surfboards again) . And yet we ended up BUYING junk instead of selling it.

Here’s a quick tally of our new belongings:
Many books. Nobody in this family appears capable of walking past a pile of cut price books without picking up a fistful. The best book purchase, by a country mile, is a 1940s pamphlet I bought that is full of handy housekeeping advice for housewives. My favorite tip involved using lead to coat the inside of clothes to make them waterproof. The pamphlet wasn’t exactly a bargain. It was in its original dustcover which said 25 cents and I paid a euro for it. I guess maybe when you take into account inflation and the guilder-euro conversion I did alright…
From now on the stuff is ranked either useful or useless or annoying.
Useful: Hockey shoes for Esther, almost unused, and new canvas shoes for Irmie. Totally unused.
Useless: A pink fake leather punctured volleyball.
This brings me to two other points. First, our Queen’s Day started early when drunken youths stole Esther and Julia’s football and netball out of our front garden last night (getting smashed on the evening before Queen's Day is also a tradition of sorts) and second, the Dutch truly are a nation of traders and not always the most scrupulous ones.
Irmie tried to haggle on the ludicrously high 2 euro asking price for the pink fake leather volleyball but the woman flogging it refused to budge, swearing that A: It was leather, despite the fact that it said in large black letters on the ball that it was made of synthetic leather, and B: That it was in mint condition. She must have meant polo mint because when Irmie brought it home and I pumped it up it was flat again within 30 seconds.
Useless: About five kilograms (I know, I carried them home) of marbles of various sizes/colors. Esther and Julia disagree, of course.
Useless: Knee pads for Esther that offer the same degree of protection as wearing a pair of long trousers while rollerblading. Dingo would disagree with the Useless tag, she thought they were very tasty.
Annoying: A handheld electric organ bought by Julia. I give it a maximum of a week before Julia loses interest in music or the bossanova beat it plays nonstop causes me to bin it.
Annoying: Julia wandered off at one stage and came back with her hair painted orange. Question: Did Esther (A) Say, that looks nice and continue hunting for punctured balls? (B) Say, that looks stupid and continue hunting for punctured balls? or (C) Go and get her hair sprayed orange too? The one saving grace is that I think most of it came out in the bath tonight.
Stuff we didn’t buy included speed skates. Everybody was selling speed skates this year. I think the whole global warming message is sinking in here.
However, I think there’s another thing at play. My guess is that a lot of the junk being sold today (and especially the ubiquitous speed skates) were bought last year, tossed in a cupboard and sold again this year without being used. I suspect that if you put a tracking device in a pair of skates 10 years ago you’d find that they changed hands once a year on Queen’s Day after spending the previous 12 months in a cupboard. The nearest any of them got to ice in that time was the cube in the gin and tonic being held by the man selling them on Queen's Day.

Life's a beach

2007-04-28T13:20:00.000-07:00

The weather was do damn warm today that not only did I have the first barbie since arriving back in the Netherlands 10 months ago, but afterwards we went to the beach. Admittedly the barbie was a disposable tinfoil tray of charcoal that nearly burned a hole in our table while only lightly warming my steak and the beach was on the North Sea, but as they say here: You have to row with the oars you're given.
Despite the green scum that was washing up on the beach, it was very pleasant. The dog learned the hard way that drinking sea water is a bad idea.

New vocab

2007-04-28T13:12:00.000-07:00

Today’s new word: Burgelijk.
It’s a very difficult one to define. It’s essentially a derogatory term which means something like bourgeois or middle class or conformist.
I’ve known of the word for years and used it as a slur to apply to other people and their actions.
It’s something I’ve always snobbishly aspired not to be.
Buying matching his ‘n’ hers bikes is burgelijk.
The act of washing one’s car can be burgelijk if you own a special bucket and sponge and hose attachment used exclusively for car cleansing duties.
In a reference back to the last new vocab, sleurhuts are extremely burgelijk – and only slightly less so if they’re rugged off-road models.
There are so many examples, but way up there on any scale of burgelijkheid is trimming one’s hedge.
For the first time, at age 40, I trimmed a hedge today.
And I kind of enjoyed it.
More specifically, I enjoyed the fact that I didn’t totally fuck it up. The hedge is still standing (though our helpful neighbor pointed out that it’s a little top heavy on our side) and we appear to have more garden as a result of my snipping.
The only really disconcerting moment came when I asked Irmie, whilst holding a big sign saying: This is a rhetorical question! if she thought I was too youthful and sexy to be trimming a hedge. Managing to be casual and sincere at the same time, she answered, No.

As if hedge trimming was not burgelijk enough for one day, I also bought a parasol for our back garden. Is parasol even an English word? I have certain Dutch words for which I no longer know the English translation – my favorite is ontsluiting, meaning dilation – as in how far is your cervix dilated madam? I only learned the English translation for that when Julia was born. Irmie dilated like a tortoise when Esther was born and like a hare for Julia.
Buying the parasol was bad but it also vindicated my insistence that we buy this house. As I may have mentioned before, when Irmie first saw it she shook her head and said, it’s nice, but the garden’s on the wrong side.
The sun-worshipping Dutch have a sort of built-in compass when it comes to gauging on which side of a house the garden is. Southeast good, northeast bad. While I was trying to persuade Irmie that we should buy this place I was dispatched to look through the windows every hour of one afternoon to see when the sun stopped shining on the back garden.
Still, thanks to climate change and a slightly lower roof than Irmie feared, we can sit in the sun pretty much all day at the back of the garden even in April.
April has already broken all records for warmth, hours of sunshine and lack of rain. My colleague at AP in Amsterdam even wanted to write a drought story. I said that until he kicked his way through a field of bleached sheep bones on the way to work or a dust storm hit Amsterdam he should probably wait, if only out of respect to Australian farmers. The farmers here are whinging because they have to dust off their pumps to suck water out of the thousands of kilometers of streams that criss-cross the country so they can irrigate their paddocks.

New vocab

2007-04-10T14:29:00.000-07:00

Today's new word, brought to you by Heidi and Bert, is: sleurhut.
Literally translated this means drag shed. Refers, of course, to the quite rightly much maligned caravan. I can see why one might need one when heading through the Outback for six months at a time - though what's wrong with a couple of swags in the tray of the ute, is beyond me - but why own one in Europe. For the amount of money you add to your fuel bill dragging one to the south of France, you could stay at a beachfront hotel in Monte Carlo - or at the very least drive down in a civilized way and pay for some French lackey to put a tent up for you somewhere on the Mediterranean coast. This has the added advantage of having a French person do a menial task for you, a foreigner. Doesn't get better that.

Dingo facts and figures II

2007-04-02T13:42:00.000-07:00

I’m no longer keeping count, but shitting and pissing in the house has already reduced to a trickle, so to speak.
To balance it out, any turds she does inside, she now tends to hide more cunningly, so they can lie unseen but not unsmelled for several hours stinking the house out until somebody works out where they are. The advantage of this for shallow and lazy dog owners like me is that I can just pretend not to see/smell the little steaming pile and leave it for somebody else to stumble across and clean up.
Car crashes caused by the dog’s refusal to ride in the car anywhere at all but on the driver’s lap: None (Yet).
Longing looks by attractive women in my general direction (but primarily, I fear, in Dingo’s direction): I’ve lost count. Seriously. This dog is actually more of a babe magnet than a real human baby.
Patio paving slabs undermined by digging: 3.
Flies and bees chased in the back garden: Dozens.
Flies and bees caught in the back garden: None. I think once she finally catches a bee this particular game will end.
Complaints from neighbor: None.
Unsolicited pieces of dog rearing advice from neighbor: Six.
Visits to the vet: One, but it was just for a scheduled vaccination and was thrown in for free by the pound when we bought her.
Nights that the dog has slept from the time I take her out for evening toilet stroll to the time Irmie’s alarm clock goes off in the morning: 1.

Swimming off

2007-04-02T13:23:00.000-07:00

I know I’ve written something like what follows before to one of my faithful readers in a personal e-mail (remember when I still wrote those things?) so whoever got that mail, you can skip this post.

On Saturday Esther and Julia took part in what translates literally as “swimming off.” This is the culmination of weeks of training apparently designed to ensure they never drown if they fall into one of the many miles of streams that criss-cross this country – they have something to do with keeping the place dryish, but don’t ask me how.
Of course, this ignores the fact that most of the streams are so clogged with rusting bicycles, thick mud and the bloated bodies of cattle who rode their bikes into the water then got stuck in the mud that you couldn’t possibly drown in them. In fact, they’re mostly so shallow you’d be lucky to get your socks wet if you jumped in.
Nevertheless, the Dutch want all children to be able to paddle around long enough for a passerby to haul them out if they do take the plunge. Also, and infinitely more importantly, swimming pools don’t allow you in the water without arm bands unless you have successfully swum off.
They start off swimming half a length wearing clothes and shoes. Julia was doing the A diploma and Esther the B. Julia had to wear shorts and a T shirt while Esther was in long trousers and long-sleeved shirt. If you keep progressing, the clothing becomes increasingly bulky until the Z diploma when you have to swim a mile in a full suit of armor and carrying a broadsword.
Once they’ve completed that, they have to hop out, strip down to their cozzie and swim a bunch more laps on their front and back. A key part of the test is THE HOLE.
This is a sheet of plastic that is suspended vertically in the water with a circular hole cut in it. The kids have to dive in and swim through the hole. As you progress through the alphabet of diplomas the hole gets deeper, further away and smaller until only an anorexic eel would be able to get through.

Julia and Esther, who spent most of their waking hours in Australia picking stuff up off the bottom of our pool, both kicked up an unholy stink about THE HOLE. The problem is that they’re not allowed to wear goggles while doing the test. I’m guessing this is because tests have shown that 99 percent of children who fall into muddy streams are not wearing goggles. The exact significance of THE HOLE is lost on me – maybe it is a replica of some kind of drainage culvert or maybe a hole in the ice that a child has to find should he/she fall through while skating. Whatever it is, it required extra training by us to get our dolphinesque children through it. Of course on Saturday, they did it easily and everybody was happy.Enhancing my long held suspicion that the whole process is a way of fleecing parents, all 34 children swimming off with Julia and all 33 in Esther’s group passed and got their diplomas. Even so, we were as proud as if they’d just performed a piano duet of Beethoven’s 9th at the Opera House. For those of you who’ve been waiting for it – and I know you’re out there – coming soon to this blog is my critique of Dutch dunnies.

Dingo facts and figures

2007-03-21T10:49:00.000-07:00

A quick Dingo-related running tally four days into her life with us:

Indoor piss puddles mopped up: 20, 25, Oh, I don’t know.Oceans.
Indoor turds picked up (and in one nasty case wiped up): 8-10ish.
Sleep-deficient nights: 4.
Complaints from the snotty next door neighbor: 1. She suggested we get a cat. I suggest she gets a new house.
Dining table chairs eaten (partially): 4 (two to go).
Longing looks by attractive women in my general direction (but primarily, I fear, in Dingo’s direction): 6.
Longing looks by unattractive women in my general direction (but primarily, I fear, in Dingo’s direction): who cares?
Number of times Esther and Julia have reneged on their absolute, cross-my-hear-hope-to-die promises to take the dog out morning, noon and night: Surprisingly few, but give them time.
It's not scientific, but I'd estimate she's defecated about twice the weight of food she's eaten. Don't ask me how that happens.

New bitch on the block

2007-03-17T14:43:00.000-07:00

Meet Dingo. Our new dog.
We picked her up today from the Hague pound at eight weeks old. The middle picture is of Irmie with Dingo's mother so I'm guessing our puppy's good looks may not last all that long.
We don't think she's going to be accepted at Crufts any time soon. The mother may have once been related to some kind of mountain cattle dog, but who knows. The father eloped before his pedigree could be confirmed.
Here's your Dutch word of the week: Mongrel = Bastard.
If I could have got away with it, I'd have called her bastard - I consider it a more affectionate Australian name than dingo.
If there is an excess of puppy shots in the coming days, I apologize. She is very photogenic. I'll try to keep the pix to a minimum.
Irmie read about a little of puppies and mother that were left in a doorway a couple of months ago. She and the girls went to the pound that was looking after them and that was about that. We had been thinking of getting a pedigree Labrador, so the cold-hearted owner who dumped the mutts did us a favor.
She's been with us all day and is settling in nicely, and by that I mean she's crapping and pissing on the floor.

A hole lot of love

2007-03-16T03:59:00.000-07:00

Could somebody explain to me the fascination people have with holes in the ground? This week, workmen are digging up our street and laying pipes. Apparently it will improve drainage and prevent our cellar from filling up with water - submerging our freezer - when it rains hard. This has to be a good thing, but is the hole itself really that interesting? People - crowds of people - stand there for HOURS. You can't see him very well in this photo from my balcony but there's a little old bloke on the right who has been looking at the hole all morning (honestly!).
I'm thinking of selling tickets.
The photo itself is about as interesting as I find the hole, but my take-it-or-leave-it attitude to the hole is getting me worried. Am I missing something?
It must also be weird for the blokes actually digging the hole. They're enclosed in this steel fence designed to keep out kids like Esther and Julia and their friends in the street who also are affected by the magnetic pull of the excavations. But from here, they look to me a lot like animals prowling around their cramped enclosures in a zoo.
The only things I care about are that the digging doesn't trigger some kind of land subsidence that swallows up our house and that it's over soon because it's causing parking problems in our street, which has a self-regulating and strictly observed parking policy. The unspoken rule is that everybody has a minimum one parking spot in front of their own house. Second cars (I think we're the only ones in the street with only one car and don't think the neighbors haven't noticed the fact) are parked as near as possible to one's own house without encroaching on a neighbor's parking privileges.

Julia dishes the dirt

2007-03-15T02:31:00.000-07:00

Julia went for a shower this morning. She kicked up the usual stink: I had a shower in February, why do I need another one now? I’m not dirty. This shower cap is too big. The water’s too cold. The water’s too hot. Close the door. Open the window.
Before hopping under the water she weighed herself, coming in at a svelte 22.5 kilograms.
After 30 seconds of standing near the streaming water and occasionally glancing at the soap (which at that time in the morning was good enough for me) she sauntered out and dried herself.
She then stepped back on the scales and said: “Still 225. I told you I wasn’t dirty.”

Saturday

2007-03-12T14:43:00.000-07:00

These are pix from our walk Saturday when the skies were still unaware of the fast approaching spring. The river scene on the left is deliberately black and white, the hay shed underneath is naturally bleached of color. I also (smiling as I ticked off another Dutch cliche) saw a farmer wearing wooden clogs. Apparently clogs are highly practical footwear for folks who work on the land - they are reasonably waterproof and can withstand being stomped on by cows.

Spring

2007-03-12T14:36:00.000-07:00

Alright, I take it all back about the rain. This weekend Irmie and I left the girls with their Oma and Opa and headed out east to Ommen where we stayed in the family vacation house of our friend Wietske.
Saturday was a little cloudy but Sunday was just wall-to-wall blue skies. The region is dotted with all these beautiful little thatched farm buildings. Barely a farmer in sight, of course, they're nearly all inhabited by yuppies who renovate them like the one pictured here. The real farmers knocked down the drafty old places and replaced them with ugly new ones, parked their Mercedes outside and surrounded them with corrugated iron sheds and piles of stinking manure.

New vocab

2007-03-08T00:41:00.000-08:00

New Dutch word learnt this week: Onophoudelijk.
Meaning: ceaselessly.
As in, it's been raining CEASELESSLY for so many days I can't remember when it started.
I understand all you Australians with your dead lawns and empty water tanks will be jealous, but believe me the novelty wears thin.

Attribution

2007-02-28T13:05:00.000-08:00

In response to my fine friend Daniel's comment re the rising tide Web site mentioned below, I hereby credit him with bringing it to my attention. Of course, he can smugly sit back and sneer at a 15 meter rise in sea levels as he lives near the coast but at the top of a hill that rises sharply from the place where the Thames estuary meets the North Sea.

video choice

2007-02-24T07:59:00.000-08:00

I just got back from renting a DVD for tonight.
After the usual seven hours of wandering around the aisles in Voorburg's criminally understocked Videotheek, it came down to a choice between The World's Fastest Indian and Al Gore's global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Irmie didn't like my last choice of film, so I opted for the documentary which I thought she'd like (enjoy seems the wrong word) more than a movie about a New Zealander trying to break the landspeed record on a motorcycle.
Now I'm thinking that maybe I should have got the motorbike film because after watching the Gore we might decide to boycott the Indian on the grounds that clocking up hundreds of kilometers an hour using an internal combustion engine and two wheels may not be exactly what the environment's waiting for.
I'd been a little concerned about the whole rising sea level thing as we now live below the existing sea level let alone whatever it might be in 100 years. However, thanks to a handy online map that shows where the beach will be depending on how high the sea level gets, I now know that it will have to go up by a whopping two meters before we need to move the fridge up to the first floor.
To see when your home will become a coveted beachfront retreat, go to:
http://flood.firetree.net/

Kroller Muller Museum

2007-02-18T13:35:00.000-08:00

Today we went to the Kroller Muller Musem, a very nice art gallery hunkered down in the middle of the Hoge Veluwe Park in the central Netherlands.
For those interested, you can find it on Google Earth at Latitude 52° 5'44.08"N Longitude 5°49'0.82"E.
An aerial shot is actually quite useful, because it shows the forest and lawns that surround the museum - all of which are dotted with sculptures - Henry Moores, Barbara Hepworths (don't feel like some kind of philistine if you haven't heard of Babs, I just had to google her to get her first name) and a load of others whose makers i've already forgotten. It also shows the big sand dune pictured in the posts below - and don't i feel pleased with myself for writing these three posts in reverse order to get them in the right sequence on the blog.
The museum is crammed with exceptionally good stuff. It's not huge but has lots of Van Goghs, a room full of Mondriaans and loads more Dutch stuff as well as a scattering of French 19th/20th century stuff, a few Picassos and lots more extremely interesting things. It was a little heavy on conceptual art for my likings - a room which had a rectangle on the floor made of slightly bent nails was one of a few exhibits that lit up the neon "But is it Art?" sign above my head. Fortunately, my fine friend Daniel was visiting from England and happens to know a thing or two about art so he was able to reassure me that, Yes. It is art. I left the "But what does it all Mean?" question unasked.
You get to the museum itself by abandoning your car at the edge of the park and hopping onto one of 1,400 frees bikes left out for visitors then pedalling a few kilometers through pine forests and barren heath landscapes to the building.
The park and particularly the dunes somehow reminded me of Australia - I remember running over dunes near Hawk's Nest a couple of hours north of Sydney with Esther and Julia when they were still very young. Also, the sculpture above put me in mind of a bleached miniature version of Kata Tjuta (The Olgas).
I'm guessing that anybody visiting us from Australia, England or anywhere else may well get taken here.

Dunes?

2007-02-18T13:00:00.000-08:00

After taking in the art we set off on our white bikes around the park and after coming out of a pine forest came across this amazing dune landscape miles and miles from the nearest coastline.
Of course, if Al Gore and all those UN climate folks are right, the sea may well catch up with this place soon enough.
Still, it was very odd to suddenly find yourself in the middle of a desert in the middle of the Netherlands.