My city. Mice city.

Rodents love Amsterdam.  In fact it's remarkable that your average thinking mouse would choose to live anywhere else. Centuries-old houses offer excellent prospects for an opportunistic small mammal. An extensive network of canals and bridges, a medieval garbage collection system and a focus on cheese completes the idyllic picture. Yet with outside temperatures sometimes hovering around -6^oC, you can understand why a resourceful rodent might at times seek out a cosy Dutch kitchen within which to retire between outdoor exploits.  I often do the same.

A cheese shop on every corner

Some months ago I became aware that a couple of mice had sought out the comfort of our kitchen. The most compelling evidence was an empty foil packet that had contained two hundred grams of pistachio nuts in their shell. When I found it, it contained nothing - not a nut, not a shell.  Nothing. My first thought was that De Jongens had devoured the nuts and left the empty packet (do all children do that, or only mine?). But the crudely-gnawed corner of the foil, in combination with a disconcerting amount of scatological evidence might just as well have been a giant flashing sign proclaiming "RODENT WAS HERE". My only consolation was the reassuringly tiny poohs that had been left behind; I was pretty sure I wasn't dealing with a rat or a wayward weasel. Just a brazen, rapacious, pistachio-shell eating mouse.

That's a relief then.

Because I like to stick my head in the sand, particularly when it comes to the possibility of needing to kill animals, I employed a two-pronged response.  First, I deliberately didn't say anything to Ned Nederlander about the pistachio theft, because I knew he would establish a chemical armoury that would leave the culprits vomiting their insides up under our fridge.  Second, I convinced myself that a mere one or two mice had taken up residence and that really, all things considered, no action was necessary.   I resolved to always walk into the kitchen stomping my feet, clapping my hands and singing loudly. For reasons I can no longer recall, I was reluctant to call on the services of one of the many euphemistically-named exterminators who seem to make their fortunes in this city.


I spotted the Mouse Doctor parked in our street shortly after we moved in.
I soon realised he wasn't there to care for a neighbour's sick pet. 

Friends suggested that a couple of mouse traps would do the trick. Alas the sound of a tripped spring snapping shut on a small mammalian neck during the night was not something that would give me any satisfaction. On the contrary, it would force me to confront some long-buried childhood memories.

When I was seven, my family moved to a remote area in rural Australia. Our arrival coincided with a mouse plague of biblical proportions.  Most of the annual wheat harvest was eaten by mice well before the harvesters could get to it. My family didn't actually grow wheat, but we provided comfortable accommodation for the fat, happy, fecund rodents who feasted on it that year. I have a memory of my seven year old self opening a cupboard, the bottom of which was a seething square metre of brown fur. I have another memory of shutting that cupboard again quickly and running outside. My mother remembers my brothers, aged five and three, playing with toy cars in a pile of dirt and gravel that we grandly called "the sand pit". As mice scurried around them, one occasionally ran up a youthful shirt sleeve. De Broers, who must have simply figured that mice were a part of life, allegedly shook them out and continued with their game. Even today, my mother looks invincibly triumphant when recounting the time the washing machine hose dispatched several dozen drowned mice into the laundry tub. It seems they had taken shelter in the hose overnight, unaware that the morning would bring a frenzy of washing activity.

Mouse traps were thus an unpleasant fixture in my life for those couple of years. The principal legacy of that time is an unshakeable image of my parents disposing of still-twitching rodents each morning. That, and an enduring phobia of having my fingers cruelly crippled. So how likely do you think it was that I would use mouse traps in my Lowlands Pestilence Response Strategy?

Not very.

Somewhat hopefully, I turned to the internet to better understand my options. Not surprisingly, my choice of search terms - "humane mouse management" - yielded few results. Removing the word "humane" introduced me to the gruesome concept of glue traps. I can accept the use of a sticky trap as a blow-fly management tool in rural Australia, but I am not happy about them being used for anything with fur. The prospect of needing to deal with a sticky board containing an immobilised live mouse so desperate to escape that it has attempted to gnaw off its own limbs is a deal breaker for me. Tom and Jerry meets The Godfather. It holds absolutely no appeal for a woman who cried in Stuart Little.

I am embarrassed to admit that I soon gave names to "my" mice.  Because they obviously lived in a complex maze of tunnels behind the cupboards, because they stored up treasures for the afterlife (principally pistachios), but mostly because they really, really annoyed the mummies, I called them Toot and Carmen.

Such thoughts of ancient Egyptians, and a recollection that they deified cats gave me another idea. I am not a fan of cats at all, but I like them more than mice so I stopped shoo-ing the neighbourhood cats out of our garden. I even tolerated the big fluffy ginger one sitting brazenly on my kitchen windowsill, hopeful that he might persuade Toot and Carmen to seek other lodgings. Kind of like Snowbell, the big old mean cat in Stuart Little.

Meanwhile, I learned that mice are almost blind, as suggested by that well-known nursery rhyme. To compensate for this disability, they urinate every twenty centimetres or so to mark where they have been. Without this "odour map" of their surroundings, they become disorientated and forget where the lucrative cupboards are. Good to know. Furthermore, I reasoned that if they can't smell any food (because the floors are spotless and the pistachio supply is now kept in a locked safe), they might just decamp to my unsuspecting neighbours' house. My Lowlands Pestilence Response Strategy was coming into sharper focus. 

For weeks afterwards, kitchen cupboards, drawers and shelves were scrupulously disinfected on a daily basis. The floor was mopped more frequently than ever before. Mouse urine be gone. A bread bin was purchased (although a family mutiny forced me to remove the padlock and barbed wire I cannily added). Crumbs were banished hourly from all surfaces and I became more tyrannical than usual about dishes needing to be put straight into the dishwasher. I crawled for hours, inspecting skirting boards and the backs of cupboards, stuffing wads of steel wool into anything that looked like a potential mouse access point.

Shortly afterwards, either Toot or Carmen died under our fridge. I like to think she died of cleanliness. I  mentioned the related odour to Ned Nederlander and left some rubber gloves and a plastic bag under his pillow. He dealt with the situation magnificently. Such a brave man.

A month or so later, I came downstairs one morning and Kleine Jongen excitedly announced "Mum, someone left the lid of the kitchen bin open last night and there's a live mouse in there".

"So have you dealt with that, darling?" I asked hopefully.

"Yep. I closed the lid".

Displaying remarkable familial team work we courageously extracted the bin liner and deposited it in the middle of the garden. A few minutes later Ned Nederlander appeared and, on hearing the story, approached the bag with a large brick raised menacingly above his head.

"NOOOOOO!!!!!!" Kleine Jongen and I cried in unison. Ned rolled his eyes, trying to disguise his relief at our pathetic intervention. He placed the brick on the ground theatrically before skipping breezily off to the office. A couple of hours later I glanced out of our kitchen window and saw a cute, slightly ruffled mouse emerge from the bin liner and scurry confidently towards our external wall and into a tiny hole of which I had previously been unaware.

On another occasion, friends from mouse-free (but cockroach infested) Sydney were staying with us. A suspicious rustle in the kitchen caught everyone's attention one lunch time.

"I think you should know there's a mouse on your stove", the visiting dad calmly noted.

"Really?" I asked, feigning surprise.

"Yes", he assured me, feigning ambivalence.

I desperately wanted to point out that I was providing him and his family with free accommodation in one of the world's great cities, and that a single teeny mouse skipping across the stove top was hardly worth mentioning. But I was embarrassed, and didn't say anything more.

My friend probably desperately wanted to point out that although he and his family were enjoying free accommodation in one of the world's great cities, the least he expected was a basic standard of hygiene. But he was embarrassed, and didn't say anything more.

For some reason since that low point in rodent relations, (not to mention guest relations ...) there have been very few mouse sightings in our kitchen, and my faith in our Lowlands Pestilence Response Strategy is gradually growing. 

My strategy has been to counter the mice strategy with a combination of cleanliness, craftiness and compassion.

My sense is that mice sense my determination.

And for now they seem to have gone elsewhere; they've found another cosy kitchen, another cupboard with an unsecured pistachio supply, another crumb-covered benchtop, another enticing kitchen bin.

But I will remain vigilant, because I know that even though this is my city, it's mice city too.

Norse code

Australians typically find the prospect of a white Christmas very appealing. So Ned Nederlander and I agreed and decreed respectively that Norway would be a fitting destination for the 2013 festive season.

My certainty that Queenstown, New Zealand was the undoubted winner of Most Spectacular Aircraft Landing in the World title was shaken by our mid-winter afternoon approach to Tromsø, at the opposite end of the planet. Land at both at least once in your life if you can.

 



On our first night inside the Arctic Circle, we drove teams of huskies through a dreamy snowscape, lit beautifully by a hazy bloated moon. As the cold air pinched my face, I kept pinching myself to make sure I was really there. I wondered if I could ever again appreciate the sweltering heat of an Aussie beach Christmas .

Dashing through the snow ...

When I needed to slow or stop, the lead dog would look at me over his shoulder with utter disdain. The rest of the team bounced impatiently on invisible pogo sticks, straining incessantly against the harness, yelping to be allowed to run some more. These dogs were not going to give up until they were airborne. Second star to the right and straight on till morning.

Later that night we retired to a communal tent, modelled on those used by the indigenous Sami people. We tried not to think about Rudolph, that famous Christmas helper, as we lay on the deliciously warm skins of his cousins, spread over a thick bed of cut branches that had been piled into a wooden box bed. Fur on fir. A pot belly stove in the centre of the tent made us forget that we were actually arctic warriors at all.

Please can we keep him?

After breakfast we visited the dogs, who were clearly grateful for the remarkable leadership we had demonstrated to them on the previous night. De Jongens both reminded me that over two years earlier, when they had so stridently resisted our planned move to the Lowlands, I had glibly promised them a Dutch dog, if only they would let go of the nice Passport Control Officer’s leg and calmly get on the plane. No dog had been forthcoming. Suddenly they were demanding a five-dog team of huskies, which apparently equates to my abandoned promise, with interest. 

I soon distracted them with a cunning display of my previously under-valued snow-mobiling skills. I raced oh so competently through a scene reminiscent of a James Bond movie, blissfully unaware that Kleine Jongen was developing hypothermia on the seat behind me. I was mesmerised by the sight of the sun standing on her solar tip-toes while trying, and failing, to peak over the horizon at 11:30am. Instead she left a taunting golden stain low in the sky, and cast an eerie blue light over an endless tub of vanilla icecream.

 

 
 

 

On another night we ventured a hundred kilometres or so further north of Tromsø, and were treated to a spectacular northern lights display that justified my fifty year wait to see it. Just remarkable.
 

 

 

 

 

Undoubtedly, we peaked too early on this holiday, so the next few days in Oslo were always likely to be underwhelming. We wiled away a half day at the Polar Fram Museum, and learned much about the people who had made the Arctic and Antarctic areas accessible, including the Inuit people, who gave me the quote of the trip. "The one who listens to his parents will live longer ... and have a better life". Lovely script too.

Inuit wisdom

Yet somehow learning about all those wild and crazy exploits just made me want to go and have a lie down in a hot bath with a good book, a cup of tea and a slice of cake.

Ned and I also made a lightning visit to the Nobel Peace Centre in the hour before it closed one evening. Should you ever need it, I recommend a visit as a good way to humble oneself. Being confronted with the stories of every Nobel Peace Prize winner and their actions and noble motivations puts one’s own antics in a sad perspective.  It left me wondering what my personal contribution to world peace should be...

Then, we took a train to Bergen on the west coast. For a large part of the seven hour journey I was a character in The Polar Express.  Grote Jongen confirmed my fantasy when he leaned over and said “I keep expecting the train to be stopped by a herd of reindeer, and for someone to pull the engineer’s beard”. Sadly, the trip was tarnished somewhat by an unfortunate incident involving a laptop, a down jacket, a sudden lurch (perhaps someone pulled the engineer’s beard after all?) and a full cup of hot chocolate. Dear reader, I can reveal that it was NOTHING like the hot chocolate scene in The Polar Express.  However, my calm (numb?) response to our incident and my handling of the hysterical protagonists, albeit through clenched teeth, in a carriage packed to the rafters with people who politely pretended they hadn’t seen a thing, may very well be my contribution to world peace.

Bergen was the final stop in our tinselled triumvirate of Norwegian towns. Clearly it has the potential to be a quaint and charming town, but its main claim to fame appears to be that it has the highest rainfall of any town this side of the Amazon. I believe that a good proportion of its annual rainfall fell during our visit. The fjord cruise operators (who had lured us to Bergen in the first place) had given in to the weather, cancelled all trips and gone home two days earlier than their websites suggested. 

Bergen; quaint, yet somehow not ...

In the end it probably didn’t matter, since Kleine Jongen surprised us all on our first night in Bergen with a spectacular middle-of-the-night vomiting performance with multiple encores. The spectacle was increased as a consequence of the combined affects of a dark hallway, an open suitcase, some bed-swapping earlier in the night, and an unfortunate case of mistaken parental identity. We concluded that it must have been caused by something he'd eaten on The Polar Express.

The following morning Kleine Jongen awoke, exhausted and lacking Christmas cheer, although with a much improved constitution, so we ventured out to see what Bergen had to offer. Not much, it turns out.

Not a single restaurant in the entire town was open on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.The few shops in town that were open were staffed by people who didn’t really want to be there.

“What a stupid time to come on holidays” growled one woman when she learned of our intention to spend Christmas in her town.  The fact that she was pocketing a good proportion of the Norwegian gross domestic product after selling us the ingredients for our Christmas Eve hotel room picnic did not seem to give her any cause to smile.

The hotel that we were staying in, which claimed enough stars to know better, didn’t even offer us a Christmas drink. Ever self-sufficient (especially when it comes to Christmas alcohol), I approached the decidedly un-festive hotel receptionist on Christmas Eve and asked if I could borrow a corkscrew. I’m quite certain she considered stabbing me with it. “A corkscrew???” Deep sigh. “I’ll see. Wait here”. Ho ho ho. Good tidings to you and all of your kin.

Minutes into our family festivities, we realised that we had been wrong after all to blame the train food for Kleine Jongen’s demise. Ned, Grote Jongen and I found ourselves BERRRRGEN  in Bergen for the next twelve hours. Being sick far from home is never fun, but I must say that there is a certain joy that comes from being able to drop a pile of “soiled” towels and sheets outside a hotel room door and have them magically disappear by morning!  When I staggered to the foyer at 2am and requested some clean sheets and towels, my receptionist friend gave me a look that left me in no doubt that she thought overuse of the borrowed corkscrew was the root of my problems.

I collapsed into my bed again, and passed Christmas Day alternately snoozing and staring at the rain hammering against the window. And just like that, the prospect of a sweltering Aussie beach Christmas suddenly seemed very appealing after all.

 

Another time, another place

Can I have a word please?

January always seems to be a very busy month for lexicographers. It is the month in which many of them make learned pronouncements on the Word of the Year (which seems to be frequently abbreviated to WOTY – an acronym surely destined for WOTY status itself; you heard it here first).

 

The American Dialect Society has voted “because” as the 2013 WOTY.  While I confess to a strong desire to be a member of something as grandly named as the American Dialect Society, and I have spent hours today pondering what they discuss at their meetings other than the annual WOTY, I am quite sure it must be a society that is closed to parents of adolescents. Can you imagine any parent of an adolescent choosing “because” as a word to be celebrated? Personally, I think it is a word to be banned.

“Why did you not hand in that assignment?” Because.
“Why are you home so late?” Because.
“Why did you hit your brother?” Because.
“Why is your vocabulary limited to single word answers?” Because.

Taking a somewhat different approach, the Oxford Dictionary’s editorial board has declared “selfie” to be the word of 2013. I am still wondering how such an invariably unflattering act (what’s to love about a triple chin, an elongated shiny forehead and an enormous forearm?) came to be so popular in the first place, so I am a long way from understanding the popularity of the word itself.

Australia’s lexicographic authority, the Macquarie Dictionary, announces its WOTY in February each year, after a month of furious voting in January, so I am unable to share its decision with you this early in 2014. However, I can tell you that last year the Macquarie editorial board came up with “Phantom Vibration Syndrome” or PVS as its nominated word. The use of three distinct words as a single WOTY says a lot for Australians’ counting ability, or more likely their disregard for international WOTY rules. Be that as it may, I have been intrigued to learn that PVS is a clinically recognised phenomenon whereby you think your phone is vibrating but it's not. This concept is so incomprehensible to me, a woman regularly criticised and abused by her nearest and dearest for consistently failing to respond to an actual vibration and/or ring tone, that I cannot begin to comprehend the notion of a phantom vibration.

In addition to WOTY’s, I have also noticed a trend among etymologically-inclined journalists to fill the many slow news days in January with insightful opinions on the worst words and phrases from the previous year; a sort of Anti-WOTY-Votie.

Thankfully, YOLO (as in “you only live once”) seems to have topped many A-WOTY-V lists for 2013, a feat that I hope will ensure its demise. It brings out the grumpy old woman in me to hear people use it as a justification for any indefensible action or inaction:

“ ... so we stole his school bag and hid it in the library. It was SOOO funny. YOLO”.

"I didn't do that thing you asked me to do because I was a bit busy, sorry. YOLO".

You're low.

“Twerking” is also high up in the unpopularity stakes, as measured by the A-WOTY-V brigade, which I’m happy about. I firmly believe that people who use that word (the sound of which is almost as bad as the concept) should be forced to watch back-to-back Miley C video clips whilst chanting “I will not say ‘twerk’ again” and being force-fed Brussels sprouts mixed with pickled herring. I would however like to popularise the word “twerk” as a term of abuse. For example, “You are a stupid twerk”. I believe it could very well become a WOTY 2014 contender, should it catch on.

I would like to submit a personal A-WOTY-V; the outdated but infuriatingly persistent “LOL”. I understand it is widely used in social networking circles to express (inaudible) audible amusement, but it tends to have the opposite effect on me, making me want to Scream Out Loud (there’s a thought; could I be single-handedly responsible for the establishment of SOL in our language, I wonder?).

I am not sure if it counts as an A-WOTY-V, but I am also keen to stop the emerging trend of using full stops as a form of emphasis.

As in “Stop. It. Now. "
"It’s. So. Grammatically. Irritating."

Full stop. No more.

But back to words. January words.

About ten years ago, my sister-in-law told me about a tradition that she and some friends had of nominating a “word for the year” (as opposed to a Word OF the Year) every New Year’s Eve. A WFTY if you will. This is an addictive initiative whereby New Year’s resolutions are shunned in favour of nominating a single word that reflects your hopes and intentions for the coming year. Sort of like a personal mantra. An annual theme. A vocabularial self-definition.

Ned Nederlander and I immediately stole the concept and have imposed it on each other and every person we have spent a New Year’s Eve with ever since.

Selecting a single word to set the tone for the coming year is harder than it sounds. It requires an honest assessment of your multiple and varied goals and challenges, and a focussed definition of the common element of all of those. The best words are discreetly ambiguous and discursively applicable. Having just discovered that word, I think I will store “discursive” as a potential future WFTY.

In 2013 my word was STEADY. I chose it at the end of a tumultuous and wildly exciting year. A year previously we had moved across the world, leaving everything and everyone we cared about, and had plunged into a new culture, new language, new lifestyle, new group of friends, new opportunity, new challenge, new hairdresser. I rode every emotion imaginable day after day, sometimes minute after minute. Overall I loved it, in the way that sailors love to negotiate a storm, but it was a chaotic and crazily unpredictable year.

But the chaos and unpredictability of my first year here was nothing compared to Ned’s. He had struggled to get traction in his new professional role and so he walked through the door most evenings looking not only soaked and frozen, but also totally bewildered and utterly demoralised.

To cap it off, I suddenly had two surly adolescents stomping through my house as well. Overloaded with the adjustments they had made, the new experiences that had been hurled at them and the hormones that their bodies were involuntarily producing, they saw our new home as a place to offload their frustrations, confusion and excitement. Terrific.

We gave them some rope. They took it. And stretched it to breaking point.

Clearly, a year in to the adventure, someone needed to step up and be the grown-up in that scenario. That unfortunate person needed to take a firm hold of the tiller and see the family through the turbulent waters of life in a foreign land, far from home and without the support of trusted allies. Who would that be?

I was the last woman standing. Me, the flighty, spontaneous, ungrounded one in the family. The one who until then had made “emotional roller coaster” a daily mantra. The one who thought Con Sequences was just another boy to be ignored.

So I chose “steady” as my word for the year last year. And it worked. It stuck in my head and I relied heavily on it to steer us through what looks like being the middle year of our Dutch foray . Whenever panic rose in my gut throughout 2013, I chanted that word. When De Jongens tested me, I chanted it. When Ned slumped through the door after banging his head against yet another corporate brick wall, I chanted it. When I died of embarrassment yet again, because of my inadequate Dutch, and was tempted to give up on my linguistic folly, I chanted it. When I realised that life back in Australia was progressing perfectly well without us, generating a major crisis of personal relevance, I willed myself to stay steady.

And somehow we hit December 31, 2013 a little calmer and a little more balanced than we had been a year earlier. We were steadier somehow.

But then 2014 loomed large. Being steady suddenly seemed SOOO last year. I relished the opportunity to get back to my roots and be flighty and frenzied again. I needed a new WFTY by midnight on December 31. In the preceding weeks I had toyed with various options. At a dinner party on New Years Eve, embellished with the most incredibly spectacular and dangerously unsteady display of street fireworks I have ever seen, I announced that my word was “RENEW”. I retained however a nagging feeling that it was not in fact my true WFTY. Too little energy; too much arrogance.

Others around our table announced worthy WFTYs; challenge, persevere, embrace, consolidate.  My inbox pinged with commitments from friends in Australia. Health, surrender, gratitude. A friend confessed sheepishly that she had assigned “READ” to her ten year old, non-bookish son. He probably wanted "pizza".

One doesn’t decide on a WFTY; a WFTY has to decide on you. It has to embed itself in your sub-conscious, to niggle away until it can’t be ignored. But it seemed that my true WFTY was being a little tardy this year.

On the evening of January 1, it announced itself. My WFTY was “LIFT”.

When I announced my WFTY modification, Ned Nederlander’s eyes lit up. He glanced at my sagging breasts, my flabby backside and my drooping jowls and he smiled with satisfaction. “Great word”, he nodded.

I hurried to clarify my intention. In a 2000 metre rowing race, of which I have completed many, the first 500 metres tends to be fast and furious, the middle 1000 metres tends to be strong and STEADY (huh!) while the last 500 metres, as you bear down on the finish line, calls for a lift in both stroke rate and will power. You have to delve into new parts of yourself and give everything you can possibly give, collapsing on the finish line if necessary, confident that you could have contributed nothing more to the effort.

I explained that I am determined to make our last year in this country really count. I want to lift my effort and my commitment to squeezing the last drops out of the great privilege we have been offered in coming here. I feel compelled to lift the family energy levels, to lift my own expectations of what we might achieve together and importantly to lift my sights beyond our current horizon to a future life beyond this most amazing of cities.

It’s not too late to come up with your own WFTY, or come to think of it your own A-WOTY-V. I'd love to know what you decide - can I have a word please?