April 2005
Both Gwen and Mia are making their moves into the media. Mia was almost a page three girl in the local newspaper when she attended a Hans Christian Andersen event at the local museum, Gammel Estrup and Gwen has become a film producer at the after school club where she has been making a spoof version of Millionaire. Meanwhile their mother is trying on a much more modest scale as you can see at the bottom of this page.
The extent to which the girls’ social lives exist independently of their parents was highlighted the day Anne came to collect Mia at school and was told that her friend was coming to play. Having, on balance, dcided that it would be OK to take the friend home, Anne was even more surprised to be met by the girl’s mother driving out of our drive having just delivered her night clothes. This was an arrangement the girls had made and Mia had forgotten to pass on to her parents.
Mia has yet to lose her first tooth at the grand old age of nearly eight while Gwen continues to lose them, one last weekend and one last night in her sleep. She was most surprised to find what she thought was a stone in her bed and a bit concerned that she might have swallowed it and lost the reward that milk teeth still attract even at the world weary age of nearly 11.
At the beginning of the month we went to see Monty Roberts, the (original?) horse whisperer training four wayward horses. It was very impressive and the message is worthwhile. He was somewhat on the defensive, so much so that we went on the internet to see what his detractors say. There wasn’t much but it seems that his family is calling him a pathological liar. How do you know what to believe in a situation like that?
Earlier in the month Tony did a whirlwind UK tour speaking at two conferences and attending a WWT meeting. And halfway through the month Anne went on a project meeting to Italy. The last leg of the journey to Italy was very turbulent and lots of people were saying their prayers. Then it was straight into daily 9-course dinners and 5-course lunches. The next meeting is in Spain and the Spaniards will probably see this as a benchmark to be beaten.
On the house front Tony has wrought a miracle in the garage to the extent that we are thinking of living their permanently. We have also finally had the new bathroom plumbed in. The girls had their first Danish bath as soon as they saw it even though we weren’t entirely sure that the outflow was properly connected and stayed in it until the water was stone cold. That was also a miracle. We seem to spend every weekend shopping until we drop. It’s amazing the number of items you need in new rooms such as curtains, carpets, light fittings and of course the furniture. But we still need the attention of various craftsmen to complete the tiling and outside walls and that this will take us at least into June.
March 05
Denmark has gone Hans Christian Andersen mad. It is the 200th anniversary of his birth on April 2nd and everything is about HC Andersen as they call him here. The shops are full of HCA books and even the TV dropped the traditional Disney hour on April 1 to show some HCA gala evening live from Copenhagen. There were some very angry children in this house.
There has been snow most of this month and we have only just managed to get the damaged trees cleared using our trusty chain saw. Meanwhile someone in Copenhagen appears to have found a different use for a chainsaw.
The new downstairs room is now finished inside and we are debating what we could use it for! Outside we are still waiting for windowsills and the outer layer of the old door to be bricked up. Mia couldn’t wait to move into her new room and was there before you could say Jack Robinson as soon as the carpenter said there was no reason why she shouldn’t take up residence. We have ordered her dream bed and meanwhile Gwen gets new storage furniture to make her room look a bit tidier. Otherwise we need the bathroom to be installed and connected and the tiling to be laid in the hallway.
Gwen has been exercising her negotiation skills again, this time at a Diddl swap session organised at the local bookshop. Thousands of gullible children buy letter paper which they will never use to write letters but which they can swap, sheet by sheet, for other designs which they haven’t bought. Gwen secured several new designs that day. Otherwise Gwen has been very pre-occupied with a foal born recently at Vivi’s and makes regular visits. At school her teacher has suggested she could read English books as well as Danish books which seems a very good idea given that her Danish reading skills are commensurate with her age. Why didn’t Anne’s French teachers ever suggest something similar?
The month rounded off with a lightning visit from Doreen and Ann, as Doreen had a pause in her treatment which meant that she could travel. It was a brief visit but the weather was lovely and we eventually managed a lovely dinner out when we could find a restaurant that was open.
Next family event is a visit to a demonstration by Monty Roberts, the original horse whisperer allegedly.
February 2005
If February were not so short then this newsletter would not be so late. February = snow, snow and snow and this has taken up much of our time one way or another. The first snowfall of the month seems to have done even more damage than January’s hurricane. It has certainly radically altered the shape of many of our fruit trees by breaking major branches and resulting in the removal of much of our adjacent wood. Remember that you can keep up with our various commitments and school holidays by looking at http://my.calendars.net/foxden/
Anne went to Ireland on an EU project. As last year, she stayed on Achill in holiday cottages. But this time the added excitement was regular power cuts starting at midnight for the first three days. This was no doubt because of the Economy 7 heating storage heaters and immersion heaters all coming on at this time. There were lots of meetings, the usual disagreements and Anne made the university students do an exercise involving personal space with people standing either too close or too far apart. A wonderful idea in theory but in practice she hadn’t counted on how hilarious the result would be and almost had to leave the room for fear of bursting out laughing. Some idea of went on can be found at http://www.rheinahrcampus.de/international/projects/achill2005/Travelogue/ picture of Anne on Day 9, piece by Anne on Day 3, personal space thing on day 5
The idea was that Anne would return Saturday afternoon and the whole family would go to Tenerife on Sunday. The flight from Dublin to Copenhagen went fine but the afternoon flight to Aarhus was cancelled through lack of passengers. SAS often do this even though we were under the impression that there is an official obligation for a SCHEDULED airline to run timetabled services unless there are technical problems. By the time early evening came the snow had started to fall in earnest and all planes needed to be de-iced. Anne was put on a plane and rang Tony cheerfully announcing she would be home within half an hour. Then it was announced that there was a 2 hour wait for the de-icing facility. This went over the crew’s time so a second crew came on board. After de-icing the plane took off . circled over Aarhus .. and returned to Copenhagen. Aarhus was too windy for a slippery landing. Passengers were offered accommodation but Anne realised this would mean arrival at Aarhus too late to get the Tenerife plane so she took the midnight train from Copenhagen to Aarhus which arrived at 4.am. And then her mobile phone battery gave up.
Meanwhile Tony had driven out to Aarhus airport Saturday evening but had got stuck just about two miles from the airport. He was digging the car out when a snow plough came past and covered the car in a mountain of snow. So they returned home with difficulty. When Anne phoned from Aarhus at 4am there was no way Tony could get out with the car. So Anne got the first local train out which got her to Ryomgaard at 8.30 am and started to walk the remaining 4 miles home. Most of the traffic were service vehicles but at last one hapless ordinary member of the public did drive past so Anne flagged him down and he took her straight to the end of the track to Ramtenvej only to meet Tony and the girls walking out as they had intended to come and fetch Anne. Driving conditions were terrible and the Tenerife plane was supposed to leave at 9.30 am from an airport 2 hours drive away in normal conditions so at that point we gave up on the idea of getting away.
So Nick, Jan, Katie and Adam had the large house to themselves and we heard about David Stroud’s diving exploits by telephone and Anne never got to meet her project partner who runs an Internet café on Tenerife. We didn’t have cancellation insurance but got an 80% refund on the flight in the form of a time-limited voucher and a 100% refund on the car hire. So financially it wasn’t too much of a disaster.
Since then there has been continuous snow in the landscape and we have got the car stuck about three times, the doors have been frozen solid and the gear box has been extremely stiff when temperatures got down to 18. The girls thought they would be having a day off school the day the car doors froze but three of their teachers happened to be driving past so they got there anyway while Anne could work at home. The snow has delayed delivery of much needed wood to keep us warm so we are forced to use the electric radiators. The snow has also meant that the workmen are not coming every day (the painter got hers stuck in the snow last week) and there are also some processes which simply must not be done in sub-zero temperatures, like brick-laying if one wants the mortar to be strong. So progress on the house is painfully slow and much delayed on the original six-week timetable.
Tony is just back from the launch of Janet Kear’s magnus opus, Ducks, Geese and Swans, http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/LifeSciences/VertebrateZoology/Ornithology/?view=usa&ci=0198546459 at the London Wetland centre which, given the circumstances, was also a sort of memorial service for her. And even here it snowed, keeping some honoured guests away.
One weekend the girls went to a girls’ gym camp which was based at a gym school not far from us. They over-nighted on the gym floor, all 200 of them so we weren’t surprised to hear that they didn’t get to sleep before 1.0am and they were exhausted the next day when we collected them. Tony and Anne didn’t get much of a chance to capitalise on the girls’ absence since Anne was attending a virtual conference http://knowtips.ca/www/moodle_1.4/moodle/index.php?loginguest=true that weekend which meant long hours in front of the computer but which was very useful for a Nordic project Anne is just starting. A few days ago she had her first virtual meeting with the various Danish and Norwegian partners and discovered that spoken Norwegian is impossible to understand, something that Tony found out when working with a Norwegian team in Svalbard the last two years. So oral meetings will in future be conducted in English even though written Norwegian is almost the same as Danish.
Gwen is still horse-mad and is devouring horse books both in English and Danish. So it was just like an episode in one of those horsy stories when a message was announced in school that a local lady needed some keen people to help her with looking after her two horses. It turned out that you could almost call this woman a neighbour. She has just moved into a huge estate when the previous owner left in disgust at the golf mecca plans http://www.djursgolfandcountryclub.dk/sites/placering.htm which would ruin his hunting. Anyway it only takes 15 minutes or so to walk down to her house. So we phoned and arranged to visit and when we went, the woman took Gwen and Mia through the whole process of what they would need to do with the promise of free riding every so often. Gwen is mad keen to do it, Mia is less horse-mad and it isn’t so easy to convince her that mucking out is fun so we don’t think she’ll be a regular visitor.
Coming up for Tony in March is a conference in Berlin about wind turbines where he will be talking to an audience that is increasingly sceptical about the benefits of wind power.