Author: Anne Fox

The price of being snow free is having high water levels as the rain continues to pour down relentlessly. The picture shows our pond with water levels at previously unseen heights. Of course the cellar is flooded. We water-proofed it but only up to a certain height and that height has now been breached. Our water, never healthy at the best of times, is now coming out brown as the water table has overwhelmed the intake point. Tony’s next worry is that the pump itself will be waterlogged.

Further out things are even worse with the main road to Kolind impassable and diversions in place.

You haven’t heard from us in a while and as you can see from the picture it is because we are both working very hard. Tony had to go to Copenhagen today in order to get his visa for his trip in a week’s time.

Tomorrow we finally get round to considering buying a new car. We’re going on a test drive of a dream car which although over four years old only has 32,000 km on the clock. (That’s km don’t forget) because it was owned by the classic one careful lady owner. The engine is so clean that it looks as though it has just been delivered from the factory. Anyway we’ll see.

On Saturday Anne goes to the Czech Republic for 5 days returning on Wednesday and setting out on Thursday to Germany for 4 days and returning the day before Tony sets off to Russia for three weeks. All very tight we know but we don’t have much choice with the dates.

The picture shows why I have been home for the past three days, why Mia’s gymnastic weekend is postponed until April, why Gwen didn’t get to her riding lesson nor Mia to her violin and gym club and why Tony got back from Berlin a day late.

The view is directly from the garage looking out to the woodshed and bin from a fairly low angle. Our neighbour has not been round with his tractor yet as it has been snowing or drifting continuously.

I have also had a stinking cold over these exact same days so have not been sure whether I am working at home or off sick.

The temperature is forecast to rise over the weekend so we should be OK for going back to work and school on Monday. The cars by the way are waiting for us on the road at the end of the drive but until the road becomes passable there is no point hiking out to them.

I like this.

Don’t forget to scroll your cursor over key words as I have added some links and they are not visually obvious.

Back in one piece from our ski-ing holiday yesterday. That is only the girls were brave enough. Tony stayed behind to look after the cat (she is very demanding). If you go to the newsletter webpage you can click on a link to see a photomontage of our exploits.

We took the ferry from Frederikshavn to Oslo (not the same route as last year) and took a train from Oslo at 11.11 pm which arrived at Geilo at 3.25 am! Fortunately there was a group of aimiable drunks to tell us where the hotel was. It was very close to the station but the double glazing is so good and the trains so infrequent that we were not disturbed during the night.

Our destination was chosen in part because we knew what it looked like from the massively popular Danish film, ‘Min søsters børn i sneen’ We didn’t manage to stay in the hotel featured in the film, Dr Holmes, but our hotel the Norlandia Geilo was very attractive with the old Norwegian wooden style present everywhere. Gwen and Mia were happy because breakfast and dinner were buffet style. The picture shows the city of gingerbread houses delimiting the buffet area.

The ski-ing was no problem after last year’s one lesson but we did not venture beyond the easy slopes. There were no major injuries only sore backs, legs and thumbs. Geilo was much more interesting than Gautefall last year as it was a proper little town with shops and cafes.

We had a few hours in Oslo on the way back which we used to visit the Royal Palace and then it was back home on the ferry. I thought it showed a singular cheek or ignorance of geography when we arrived back at Frederikshavn and were greeted by a sign as we drove out of the harbour ‘Welcome to the continent’

The girls want to return to Geilo next year, but then again they wanted to return to Gautafell this year. The whole thing cost a fortune of course but I have not added it up yet.

This was a Christmas present, a do-it-yourself Monopoly set. What you see in the picture is the Mayfair/Old Kent Road corner. We have decided that the street where weapons and illegal fireworks were found recently should be the Old Kent Road while naturally Ramtenvej and Lübker Golf  end up in the Mayfair/Park Lane area. Tony went round photographing all the streets of Nimtofte and was in danger of being arrested for loitering with intent as we were otherwise occupied at the time and so he was on his own.

We have played it and yes, you do get that Mayfair feeling whether when hoping you can buy it or hoping you won’t land on it once somebody else has bought it.

Amazing the things that go on when your back is turned. It seems that Nimtofte is becoming a hotbed of criminality with an audacious armed robbery of the local supermarket last week. It happened just as the supermarket was about to close at 7pm and customers caught up in the mayhem did not get back home until 10.30pm. The police caught the robber 30 minutes after it happened even though he had changed clothes to throw them off the scent. But then all the witnesses had to be carted to the local police station to give statements and then had to be seen by psychologists to be counselled and assessed for post traumatic syndrome. That must have been the biggest shock for those lost in the wine section who hadn’t a clue what was going on at the tills.

No Foxes were involved.

Gwen had an appointmnt at a specialist dentist yesterday. Although extensive X-rays had been taken and sent on to the specialist I still thought that this was just an examination and not treatment so we were both shocked to find that he was preparing to take a tooth out. Actually she needs two taken out but he thought it would be unfair to render both sides of her mouth unusable for eating so he did only one.

Gwen thinks it wasn’t as bad as Mia’s extraction a few weeks ago which she witnessed. I don’t know how she can know that. Anyway it was copulsory icecream for dinner as the dentist had said she wasn’t to eat anything hot or hard that evening.

She seems to have recovered very quickly from the ordeal. We just have to remember to have her stitches out next week. The next one? In April I’m afraid.

Just in case you thought that this golf resort thingy was pretty small scale, the picture shows an aerial view of developments up to November of last year. The road between the village and us is somewhere inthe centre of all this devastation.

I’m doing this quickly in case the lights go out again. We are having very strong winds at the moment and have already had one powercut today. This is the third day of storms and hopefully the last.

Happy New Year to all of you. We noticed that Hogmanay was cancelled in Edinburgh because of the stormy weather which we are now enjoying on the first day of 2007. On the stroke of Danish midnight the weather was not so bad so we were able to enjoy other people’s fireworks across the fields. We never use them ourselves because of the thatch. We did however dare to light sparklers and set off party poppers but not in the vicinity of Rosemary out of fear that she might run off screaming down the lane.

Other people had different sorts of fireworks we discovered when reading the local paper. It seems that a Nimtofte resident was carted off by the police, the day after Tony’s bomb scare, for having a hoard of illegal firearms and hand grenades. It was even the same bomb disposal team which ransacked his house and blocked off the centre of Nimtofte while they assessed the extent of the cache. The address rang a bell and when I looked up Mia’s contact list, sure enough, there it was, the address of one of her classmates who had only been in the class three months before mysteriously disappearing last Christmas with her mother and causing Mia great distress into the bargain. Perhaps we now know why. But before they disappeared Mia had been over to play. Nice!