Pedicures, white asparagus and trips to heaven

I love May.

That reminds me, I must book a pedicure

After months of low grey skies, vicious cold winds and depressing drizzle in the northern hemisphere, May pops up, cheerful and promising. May is like the arrival of a favourite aunt at a dull gathering of your extended family. While no-one openly acknowledges it, everyone is anxiously and hopefully awaiting her arrival. When she finally bursts through the door, all cuddly and bubbly, sassy and bossy, everyone relaxes. She deposits armsful of fresh produce and homemade delights on the table, then with a sly wink and an irreverent hoot pops the cork from the champagne bottle. Within minutes, everyone is dancing and laughing and telling inappropriate jokes in front of the children, having forgotten how boring things were before May came along.

The arrival of Aunty May here in the lowlands not only brings promises of champagne, dancing and laughing, but also sunshine, greenery, tulips and (crucially for me) white asparagus. All are essential to the post-winter regeneration of the soul.

White asparagus - a special treat from Aunty May

Aunty May’s arrival brings unspoken secondary benefits too, including (but not limited to) the urgent undertaking of overdue pedicures, waxing and exfoliation , which to my mind are also essential for the wellbeing of the soul.

But one of the best things about Aunty May coming to the lowlands is that you know it’s holiday time. There are so many holy days at this time of year that I feel compelled to provide an (outsider’s) explanation.

King’s Day, 27 April – the warm-up

Fools in orange sequins and feathers

The string of Dutch public holy days starts a few days before Aunty May arrives in town with Koningsdag, a remarkable preparatory event that sees the entire country shrug off its dusty winter coat and replace it with a festive cloak of orange sequins and feathers.

The Dutch celebrate the monarch’s birthday in a bewildering display of intensely overt nationalism which somehow – possibly because most people look like circus escapees – manages to be as hilarious as it is inoffensive. It is a holy day in the truest sense of those words – it celebrates something that is sacrosanct, faithfully adhered to and widely revered. And by day’s end you see a lot of people bowing down, speaking in strange tongues and occasionally lying prostrate. It can be a very religious experience.

Remembrance Day, 4 May – a complicated reminder

The reverie subsides quickly and sobriety returns in time to mark Remembrance Day on May 4. In other countries it is known as Star Wars Day (“May the Fourth be with you”) or as Audrey Hepburn’s birthday (a woman well worth remembering in her own right).

But here in the lowlands, it is a day to acknowledge all those who have fallen, not only in battle but also in resistance and in persecution.



One of my favourite Amsterdam monuments, in memory of the women of Ravensbruck 1940-1945.
For she who went to extremes to speak out against fascism

While not a public holiday, it is a day that resonates strongly with the Dutch, who come out in force to contemplate their complex history. As an outsider, I am fascinated by what I see as a strange mix of survivor’s pride, enabler’s guilt, beneficiary’s gratitude and modernist’s resolve. In an attempt to understand it I (and a thousand or so of my closest Dutch friends) walked in the Mayor’s Silent March in the late afternoon light on Remembrance Day this year.


A slow and silent march, giving plenty of time to
contemplate my Dutch vocabulary

 
The march, which is a hauntingly silent holy pilgrimage, follows a three kilometre route from Museumplein to the national monument at Dam Square, passing several beautiful memorials along the way. The walk, led by the Mayor of Amsterdam and a couple of hypnotising military drummers, provides ample opportunity to remember the millions of lives lost and the incomprehensible resilience that has been shown in re-building this country over the past seventy years.

At 8pm, the country observes a two minute silence, so whether you are driving a tram, walking the dog, cycling from work, or as Ned Nederlander and I were, tucking into a meal in a restaurant with friends, you are compelled to stop and remember.

 

I harnessed appropriate thoughts for a large proportion of the two minute period, but because I am a woman with a short concentration span, I confess that my mind wandered during the last thirty seconds. At that point I became distracted, as I often do, by a word. It suddenly occurred to me that the Dutch word for Remembrance Day is Dodenherdenking which for someone with as loose a grip on the language as I have, can be crudely translated as “rethinking about the dead”. I was reminded, as if I needed it, of how much I love linguistics and how grateful I am for the sacrifice that the contemporary Dutch population makes in allowing me to butcher their language and participate in their culture.

Liberation Day, 5 May – freedom from seriousness

The following day, May 5, is Bevrijdingsdag, the anniversary of the end of the occupation of the Netherlands during World War II. It generates a significant change in pace and mood; it is celebratory and upbeat, and a great excuse for a party or at least a couple of wild and debaucherous music festivals. However, for reasons that only Dutch bureaucrats understand, Bevrijdingsdag has been declared a five yearly public holiday, including as luck would have it, 2015. So this year we were granted another holy day and another reason to love Aunty May.

Ascension Day , 14 May – a missed opportunity?

We have barely caught our breaths before we are hit with another holy day and another wonderfully evocative example of Dutch linguistic creativity. Ascension Day, a blessed public holiday in the lowlands, occurs forty days after Easter, therefore always a Thursday, marking the day when Jesus ascended to heaven. The Dutch refer to it as Hemelvaartsdag, which, at least to my simple mind, translates as Trip to Heaven Day. Pondering this recently, Ned Nederlander remarked that if Jesus had delayed his trip for just one more day, he would have gone to heaven on a Friday, and we would all have a long weekend each year. However, since He did choose Thursday, and giving due consideration to the potential for jet lag, perhaps in future Heemelvaarts Friday should be declared a recovery day and therefore a public holiday? Then again, the Australian government doesn’t even recognise Trip to Heaven Day as being worthy of a public holiday, so I should simply be grateful for a lazy Thursday, especially one with such a cute vocabularial twist.

Pentecost days, 24 and 25 May – pent up double-dipping

The Dutch do however grab a sneaky extra day’s break during the final fabulous holy days of May. The Dutch refer to this time, the fiftieth day after Easter when the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples, as Pinksterdagen. It is known as Pentecost in many other countries (as in pentathlon, pentatonic, pentagon ...get it? Multiples of five; huh, that’s clever). It is typically marked with appropriate Sunday church services, although it seems to seldom be celebrated with a public holiday. Additionally, the Dutch (with no biblical authority as far as I can tell) have declared the day after Pentecost Sunday to be worthy of a break from work and school, referring to it simply as “Second Pentecost Day”. It’s generally seen as a day to worship at the retail altar. In an even more far-fetched interpretation of Pentecost, the administrators at De Jongens’ school have declared the following Tuesday to be an in-service day. Not such good news for teachers, but an excellent win for parents and students wanting to get away over a four day long weekend with sunny Aunty May.

Opa's Octacost, May 18 - a lesser known holy day

Opa Max, Ned Nederlander's widely-adored father, turns 80 tomorrow. Most of his children and grandchildren gathered around him and Oma Hilary at a Sydney waterfront restaurant this weekend to celebrate. Sadly, neither Ned, De Jongens nor I were there to share the celebrations in person - regrettable proof of the tyranny of distance. But that will not stop us from celebrating the wonderful contribution he has made to all of our lives.

Opa Max casts his golden spell over the Netherlands

during a recent visit

He loves, supports, steadies, amuses, impresses, nurtures and gently guides us all. We are all better people for having Opa Max in our lives.

It is my firm belief that a public holiday should be declared in his honour.

Happy birthday Opa Max.

 

 

The politics of goose poo

Such is my status in Dutch society that I have, only hours ago, cast my vote in my first Dutch election. I love a good voting opportunity, whether it is to choose a national government, a school board member or to settle a family dispute about which take-away to order on Friday. Family members and long-term-friends have endured decades of my political rants, and they know how dearly I hold my civic duty and democratic right to vote. Despite their often flimsy foundations, these rants have been enthusiastically delivered through a variety of means including drunken dinner party debates, feisty letters to editors and nerdy “statement t-shirts”. On one memorable occasion, at a generously liquid reception at the US embassy in La Paz, which Ned Nederlander and I somehow accessed, I even debated some now-forgotten political point (in Spanish) with a British embassy staffer. I recall him looking at me with some bemusement, perhaps because I don’t actually speak Spanish. Apparently that night I thought I did. Ole.

 

My opinions have been freely provided (and come to think of it, almost invariably unsolicited) across many platforms. But until now they have not been formally sought in a global setting, notwithstanding those excruciating five minutes in La Paz.

So it was with considerable enthusiasm that I received my Dutch stempas or voting pass through the post a few weeks ago. Even though you didn’t ask, can I just take a second to tell you that I have realised that the Dutch word stem means both “to vote” and “voice” – another one of those smile-inducing linguistic moments.



 

The stempas was evidence that the Dutch provincial elections were imminent. The fact that I was the recipient of my own stempas was evidence that my entry to global politics was also imminent. Admittedly, my inability to name a single candidate gave me a slight cause for concern, but since a lack of knowledge has never before dissuaded me from providing a strident opinion, I convinced myself that I’d be up to speed in no time and ready to vote come March 18.

Sadly, early in my electoral research I came to the shattering realisation that I was in fact not eligible to vote in the provincial election. This was due to my not yet having lived in the Lowlands for five consecutive years. Three years ... five years ... personally I don’t see much difference.

 

However a dubious consolation vote was on offer. It seems that two concurrent elections were scheduled for March 18 and I was eligible to vote in the second – the Dutch Water Board or Waterschappen elections. These represent a fourth layer of government after the national, provincial and municipal administrations. Based on my Australian experience, three layers of government is way too cumbersome. How then can this nation of 17 million people support four layers?

 

Initially I scoffed at the triviality of my electoral opportunity, uncertain whether even I could muster the enthusiasm to vote in such a contest.

But before you also scoff, consider how crucial water management is in this country. More than a quarter of the Lowlands lies below sea level, a feat only made possible by the one thousand kilometres of dykes holding back the “water wolf”. 

The (Water) Wolf at the door

This country, measuring only 600 by 450 kilometres, contains six thousand kilometres of natural and artificial water courses within its boundaries.

So if you’re going to vote for a Water Board member in any country in the world, it’s going to be here, right? Elect a group of incompetent fools and it can put a dampener on your whole day. The country will be flooded with complaints.
 
So I set out to educate myself before I headed to the polling booth. I discovered that there are 22 water boards, spread across the twelve Dutch provinces. In my (unsolicited) opinion, that smacks a little of over governance. Undeterred, I went on to identify my own local Water Board. It goes by the decidedly dry name of Amstel, Gooie en Vecht. To my dismay I then discovered that no fewer than thirteen parties have nominated candidates in Amstel, Gooie en Vecht, suggesting quite a bit of fluidity in policy variation, with considerable potential for overlap. My dedication to my civic duty began to waver.

Fortunately, an entire website has been created to help me make my choice between the thirteen parties. It’s called the Choice Compass, and I suspect that several of my friends are secretly hoping for a hyperlink. Here it is.

The Choice Compass comprises a series of thirty questions on different water policy issues, each with a brief background explanation. Respondents indicate their position on a scale from Completely Agree through to Completely Disagree. The thirteen parties indicate their position on each question, so respondents can see which party they are most aligned with.

I entered my responses, with the characteristic gusto of a woman comfortable giving her own opinion regardless of her knowledge of the topic. The only question that really stopped me in my tracks was a request for my opinion on goose culling. This was not something I had previously given a lot of thought to, although as a cyclist I do find goose poo to be a nuisance when it is deposited in disturbingly large blobs by reckless birds on rural canal-side cycle paths. Whether that makes the geese themselves a nuisance worthy of culling, I am not so certain about. On a related note, I have imposed family sanctions on fois gras purchases for as long as I can remember. For the record I find the force-feeding of birds barbaric. But that's just my opinion.




"To reduce nuisances, the Water Authority ... may kill geese"

I was also a little perplexed by a question about whether development aid should continue. I think this has something to do with sharing Dutch water management expertise, which in a world challenged by drastic climate change, I’m in favour of. However, not entirely certain what actually lay behind this question, I decided to interpret it in an Australian context, solely to suit my own political purposes.



"The Water Authority ... should stop with development aid"

Still fuming that Tony Abbott’s conservative Australian government recently slashed its development aid budget by 20%, I thought it might be a good opportunity to make the point that I Completely Disagree that any government should stop development aid. And so another unsolicited political opinion is expressed.

After completing the questions, the website helpfully elucidated my position on Dutch water management. Two minutes earlier, I hadn’t known that I even had a position on Dutch water management, although of course if pushed I probably could have given you one.

The red circle on my Results page shows my position relative to the standing parties.



Slightly left of centre ... who would have guessed?

I was somewhat disappointed to be so far removed from the enticingly named 50 Plus Party, but I was happy to find myself relatively aligned with the Water Natuurlijk Party, whose logo I was quite taken by.

Duly informed, I took myself off to the nearest polling booth, having practised the Dutch word for “goose poo”, on the off chance that an exit pollster might seek my views on the big issues of the day. I stood in the booth for at least ten minutes, partly because I was revelling in my newfound role of Global Voter, but more because I was more than a little taken aback by the table-cloth sized voting paper. Thirteen parties sure, but the fact that several of them had around twenty candidates was something that Choice Compass had not prepared me for! Are there really that many Dutch people that keen to be involved in dyke maintenance, groundwater allocation and goose culling? And how should I prioritise those individuals?

But there is no longer time to ponder such questions, for now I must turn my attention to the New South Wales election to be held on 26 March. Readers can only imagine my glee at recently receiving a letter inviting me to submit an online absentee vote in an election that I actually know a little about. I can even log on and practise voting if I want to!
 

Then, to top off my week , Grote Jongen enrolled in Global Politics as one of his IB Diploma subject choices. Yes, I've read all the parenting books about not living vicariously through your children, but surely you'll  give me this one? I'm already excited about reading his text book.

So then, two elections in two hemispheres within two weeks, followed by two years of living with a Global Politics student. In my opinion, that’s too exciting.

Leaving. Again

It’s turning out to be a rougher flight than I expected. According to the map on the back of the seat in front of me we are just crossing the northern Australian coastline. Darwin is apparently to the north west of us, although the thick clouds outside the window suggest that it is equally likely that we are at the North Pole. Our entry to the airspace above the Arafura Sea has been met with quite some meteorological resistance, so the captain has switched on the seatbelt sign, which always makes me nervous mid-flight. Actually, I am nervous for the duration of any flight, but this one is proving to be particularly challenging. For this time, as well as being physically jostled and tossed in my seat I also feel anxious, excited, guilty, concerned, grateful, and a little confused about exactly which country my head is in. Turns out it’s split between two.

Almost three weeks ago, Ned Nederlander, De Jongens and I flew into Sydney for a Christmas visit. Until recently, that flight would have marked the end of a three year ex-pat adventure in the Lowlands; we were due to come “home” to the harbour city to stay. We had expected to close the book on our three year adventure and fall comfortably back into step with the kith and kin who had so graciously encouraged our odyssey in the first place. Instead, a couple of months ago we made the exhausting, excruciating, exhilarating decision to stay in the Lowlands for a few more years. Arriving at that decision was torturous, as the long-suffering friends who propped us up during the process will attest. Weighing up the relative benefits of life in Sydney and Amsterdam felt like making a choice between the mango pannacotta and the chocolate tasting plate at the end of a sumptuous feast. A little bit of both would be perfect, but sadly not a menu option.

 

Our final decision to remain a while longer in the Lowlands meant that the planned permanent homecoming morphed into a temporary visit. Suddenly that visit is over and as I type, we are en route back to an extended Lowlands experience. Somewhat unexpectedly, I’m finding that a bit confronting.

Our drive to the airport this morning was subdued and pensive. At the check-in counter, I was surprised by a sudden desire to call the whole thing off and go straight to the beach for one more pine-lime Splice. Minutes later the universe seemed to be colluding with me, as my old and battered passport refused to allow itself to be scanned. While official brows were furrowed and calls to supervisors were made, I decided to avoid asking the obvious question of why my passport number could not simply be typed manually into the computer like in the old days. Truth is, I was secretly thrilled at the thought that I might be granted a few more days of harbour-side seafood lunches with girlfriends while a replacement passport was produced. My fantasy was short-lived however as moments later I was waved through the barrier with a cheery and oh-so-Australian “you’re good to go, love”. I strolled over to my waiting family, still puzzled as to why I was not more enthusiastic about returning to the Lowlands.

Now, some hours into the flight, I remain confused and conflicted. The in-flight map on the screen in front of me shows the familiar outline of Australia disappearing behind me. A figurative aeroplane glides over the map, indicating our current location. I concentrate hard and will the little plane to turn around, but I am childishly distressed to realise that it is after all moving forward, millimetre by millimetre. A solid yellow stripe emanates from the tail of the graphic aeroplane and stretches all the way back to Sydney, reminding me of where I’ve come from. A dashed yellow line stretches out across the ocean in front of us, indicating where we are going next. It disappears off the side of the map, reminding me that I really have no idea where I am headed, other than to the edge. I am worried that this yellow line is a pixellated cartographic allegory for my life, but then I am unexpectedly cheered by the realisation that even in my mental confusion, I can still generate phrases like “pixellated cartographic allegory”. How good is this third glass of wine??

The flight information screen is a veritable smorgasbord of data but frankly it adds to my confusion. For example, I so wish that I didn’t know that it’s 6:58pm where I’ve just come from, 3:58pm where I am heading for a brief stopover, and 8:58am at my final destination. How on earth (or in the air) am I supposed to process that in my current emotional state? It is equally unhelpful for me to learn that it is 30^oC at my departure airport, minus 55^oC outside the window where I am currently sitting, 16^oC at my imminent stopover destination and probably 1^oC or less at my final destination.

So, here I am, being propelled through the sky in a metal tube, more than eleven kilometres above the coastline of my homeland. Apparently, in 5 hours and 18 minutes the tube will come to a stop and I will be squeezed out of it. I will wait a few hours before entering another metal tube and continuing to travel backwards in time and space for a further twelve and a half hours on my mind-bending, emotion-contorting journey. By then I will be fundamentally altered, hemispherically, temporally, seasonally and thermally. I will need to then gather myself for a potentially uncomfortable conversation with a Dutch immigration officer, who will no doubt expect a good explanation for the fact that my residency permit expired yesterday, and who is likely to take some convincing that I expect an extension to be forthcoming any day now. At that, I wonder if the pilot would consider turning around and delivering me back to Sydney, but emotional exhaustion gets the better of me and I fall asleep before I can ask him.

On waking I watch a movie, titled somewhat prophetically “This is Where I Leave You” (spooky, huh?). Four adult siblings spend a week with their loving but eccentric mother (oooh, that’s a bit close to the bone).

They laugh, reminisce, confess, squabble, expose, reveal, infuriate, divide and unite (is it just me or is it hot in here?). In the final dramatic scene, one of the siblings is inspired to leave the family gathering somewhat impetuously, jump into a conveniently parked convertible and drive, wind in hair, uplifting music pounding, to a distant destination that he has long dreamed about visiting (okay, that's enough). Actually, the plot is much more sophisticated than I make it sound, but it’s hard for me to channel sophistication while I am snivelling like a baby at the thought of leaving my own family and friends some hours earlier.

Somewhere around the time we crossed the equator (I guess it was near the very point where water starts to go down the drain in the opposite direction), my spinning head finally calmed. In Hong Kong airport, we were reunited with friends from Amsterdam who were transferring onto the same flight as us. Sitting with them at the departure gate, chatting about mutual friends, speculating about emerging controversies at our local football club and observing the easy friendship between their boys and De Jongens was grounding and reassuring. I became aware of a number of people around us speaking Dutch; the much-loved soundtrack of our lowlands life, and I happily let it wash over me (while pondering how good it would be if I understood more than one word in fifty). Meanwhile, Grote Jongen nodded at a stunning girl standing nearby and when I raised a curious maternal eyebrow he was quick to explain that she was in his grade at school. Kleine Jongen stopped talking about the Australian cricket team and instead returned to musing aloud about the English Premier League. Ned Nederlander mentioned work for the first time in a fortnight and casually remarked that he’d be making a day trip to Germany in a couple of days. So began the slow re-entry to my other world, and with it the gradual settling of my turbulent emotions.

Taxiing from the terminal in Hong Kong for the last leg of my latest journey, I pondered the incredibly good fortune of being able to leave one place I call “home” in order to go to another place I also call “home”, and to be equally enamoured with them both. I considered the great gift of being equally “at home” in two cities on opposite sides of the globe, and the even greater gift of being free to choose between them. It seems the price of such a privilege is that I am destined to live with my heart split between two countries, my head swivelling Janus-like between them, my feet itching relentlessly to skip to the other place and then wanting to come back again.

For now I'll happily pay that price, and endure the occasional turbulence that goes with it. So this is where I leave you ... at least until I come back.

A "framily" adventure

This gem appeared on my Bookface feed this morning. 

 

It’s a quote from Jane Austin’s Northanger Abbey. It was posted by my dear friend Lady Howmany, an inspiring mother of four very fine young women.  She shared it hours after she deposited her two 15 year old daughters on a plane bound for my village on The Other Side Of The World.  The twins, or RaLa, will spend the next two weeks at the little known (because it didn’t exist before today) Low Down Dutch Finishing School in Amsterdam, of which I am, apparently, the Principal.

Lady Howmany and I know a bit about villages and their value.  We lived around the corner from each other in the “village” of Sydney.  During that time, she taught me the truth of the oft-quoted adage that “it takes a village to raise a child”.  She certainly helped raise mine.

I met her in the school playground a decade or so ago.  She was gloriously competent, confident and self-assured.  The sight of Her Ladyship effortlessly wrangling four feisty girls and a couple of extra playmates, all under six years of age, into a small bus was a sight to behold.  The realisation that she could do that while simultaneously conducting a phone call with her boss, triumphantly extracting a long-lost library book from a school bag, expertly applying a bandaid to a scraped knee and calmly completing the overdue netball registration form convinced me that she was unlikely to ever want to be friends with someone like me.  Until I saw her in action I truly thought that my emerging ability to get a four and a six year old boy into a car and have their seat belts done up in less than fifteen minutes was admirable. 

However, we did become friends, for which I must say I take full credit.  I make that claim because I believe that we bonded over my somewhat pretentious use of one of the few words in the English language that m'lady didn’t know the definition of.  If I recall correctly, she was telling several of us how busy she had been that day, and I casually remarked that she was suffering from “the curse of the fecund”.  The irony of a mother of four asking what “fecund” meant still makes me chuckle.

Before the day was done the friendship was cemented not only by a shared love of words and an equally irreverent sense of humour, but also by a mutually recognised opportunity to redress the gender imbalance in our respective families.  We set out on an ambitious and blatantly contrived social engineering scheme to constructively expose our offspring to the opposite sex.  When “boys’ germs” and “girls’ germs” were rife in the school playground that our six children shared, our respective houses appeared to give them all immunity.  At school they barely acknowledged each other. But in each other’s houses they jumped on trampolines together and built cubby houses together.  When it got too dark to do that anymore they lolled on sofas together, alternating between movies about princesses and movies about action heroes (hopefully realising that the storyline in both was identical).  They squabbled together, they ganged up against each other, and then before we knew it they had regrouped and  were giggling together during one of countless shared meals.  They were so comfortable in their inter-familial gang, flipping effortlessly between their inter-familial houses and travelling in their inter-familial cars that Lady Howmany and I decided they were “framily”; more than friends but not quite family.  A decade later, her four girls are still referred to in our house as “the fristers”; more than friends but not quite sisters. 

In a few hours, two of the fristers will once again be sitting in our living room.  From there we'll set out together to discover my Amsterdam village and places further afield.  Before too long I expect they'll be squabbling with their frothers and then giggling with them once again around our shared table.  

And so, I hope, The Low Down Dutch Finishing School will take us all right back to that beautifully happy place where our framily started a decade ago. Now that's what I call an adventure.

 

Trevails of two travelling teens

Twenty minutes from adventure. Twenty light years from appreciating it.

De Jongens have spent the last two and a half years living a twenty minute bus ride from one of the busiest airports in Europe.  Affordable flights to countless exotic destinations are theirs for the taking.  Furthermore, they have been blessed –yes, blessed - with parents who love to travel.  You would think this heady combination would provide untold opportunities for family adventure. 

"I simply can't look at another real life castle"

Yet instead it provides untold opportunities for juvenile complaining and associated parental incredulity.

“Do we have to go away AGAIN?”

“How long for?”

“WHY do we have to go away EVERY break? Can’t we just stay home for once?  We ALWAYS go away. None of my friends go away. EVER.”



Tolerating another pile of ancient bricks.
This time in Rome

“This family sucks.”

“I’m not going.”

Ned Nederlander and I cling desperately to our parental self-control.  Through gritted teeth we proffer calm reassurances and gentle counter-points.  “Yes, aren’t you lucky?” and “At least you won’t have to look at that silly old X-Box for a while; won’t that be a relief?”

And our favourite “It will be great.  You’ll see things you’ve never seen before, and which some people will never see in their lifetime. “



Hey, the graphics here are quite good really

“Great”, they huff. “How about you go and find those people and take them with you because maybe they’ll appreciate it more than we will.”

This exchange, I’ve come to realise, is the modern equivalent of my mother’s “Eat your dinner and be thankful you have food on your plate because there are children starving in Africa you know”. To which my siblings and I, and I suspect many of my esteemed readers with similarly compassionate parents, frequently retorted “Fine, put it in a box and send it to them.  But I doubt even they will eat THIS”.

That's nothing - we've seen moods all over Europe

Interestingly, the same children who so vehemently rail against the cruel travel regime we impose on them, spend many of their waking hours taking themselves off into various fantasy worlds, courtesy of a game controller, a mobile phone or a laptop, and frequently all three simultaneously. 

Exasperated, I demand to know why it is that they can spend hours each day cruising through digital worlds of other people’s making, yet not want to cruise through a perfectly fabulous real world right outside their own front door?

Their reply is loaded with teenage logic and no small amount of calculated provocation.

The Sahara, as seen by a person who was actually there

“Listen, we’ve already seen the place you want to take us – we looked it up online and we saw loads of pictures so we don’t need to go now”.

Cue: stomping, slumping, sighing, sarcasm, screeching and slamming of doors. 

By me; the supposedly mature, wise, adult.

Finally, happy with the response they have incited, one of them will ask, in a resigned tone of voice, “Does the place we’re staying at have wifi?”

That’s when we know we’ve got them, and realise they have been playing us all along.  Soon after that point we find ourselves skipping to Schiphol yet again.  On the way one or other of De Jongens is highly likely to say “Look, thanks for these amazing opportunities you are giving us. I know we sometimes appear like completely ungrateful little toads, but actually we realise how privileged we are and we are certain these trips are helping us put the world in context. You two are the best parents.  Ever.  Thanks for all the opportunities you are so selflessly giving us.”

Really.  They do.

Ok, no they don’t.  Ever.

Once at the airport, having overcome any issues arising from De Jongens’ plaintive claims to the Border Control officer that Ned and I are complete strangers intent on kidnapping them and stealing their kidneys, we start to relax.  Sometimes however we are subsequently called on to assist the security personnel remove the silver spoons that De Jongens have shoved down their socks (having taken them out of their privileged mouths) in an attempt to set off the metal detectors and have themselves evicted from the airport.  Once these and a variety of other unexpected traumas have been dealt with, Ned and I generally agree that we have earned a holiday.  It’s at that point that we can see clearly enough to remind each other that gratitude can’t be forced on people. Particularly your own offspring.  We then move on to acknowledge, with incredible maturity and wisdom, that appreciation for opportunities sometimes only comes with time and hindsight.  With luck, the value of the heady combination of a twenty minute bus ride to Schiphol and two wanderlust-stricken parents will one day dawn on De Jongens. 

For my part, I now realise that my own mother's heady combination of tuna bake with curried cabbage wasn’t as bad as I thought at the time, and I apologise for my lack of gratitude.  In fact, had I eaten it while it was hot, instead of complaining and resisting for the duration of the meal, I probably would have grown to love it and experienced a considerable increase in nutritional benefit in the process.

And by the way Mum, if you have some of it left over now, I’m happy to personally deliver a care package to Africa.  I can be at Schiphol in twenty minutes.

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