Author: Anne Fox

Yes, even though October is drawing to a close we are still harvesting raspberries, grapes and tomatoes here plus our pelargoniums are still outside as we haven’t had a frost yet.

Rosemary was hale and hearty after 4 days without us. It has so far been a good plan to get our neighbour to look after her rather than transporting the animal somewhere else. She is not that curious to be outside though, compared to our previous cat so maybe it wasn’t such a hardship. The picture shows Mia and Rosemary discussing tactics on the Pet Hotel computer game.

The girls have just been to see ‘Over the Hedge’ which they said was very good. We adults went and had a long coffee in one of the two cafés open in Grenaa instead. Today was the end of half term so back to work and school tomorrow.

Gwen says that she has been dreading this for seven years. There is an annual school festival at which it is traditional for the 6th year (Gwen’s year) to do a play. It must be said that some of the recent ones have been terrible. And that is what Gwen’s class teacher thought also as she put out the message that this year was going to be different and that it would be a fantastic performance that no-one would forget and for all the right reasons.

The chosen piece was a cowboy farce. Some of the children had problems with the setting because they don’t watch cowboy films or series as much as they did when we were young. So one homework task was to watch a cowboy film. I managed to find one which had the requisite saloon punch-ups and shoot outs (Ride the High Country, 1962 in case you’re wondering!). There was also a great deal of work around the special effects and what could they use for blood, how to simulate shattering glass and so on.

Last night was the big night and it went very well. The audience laughed in all the right places and for someone who wasn’t that willing in the first place, Gwen ended up with a character who had quite a bit to say for himself even though he wasn’t the main character. She was the sardonic barber since you ask. So why isn’t the picture one of Gwen’s thespian exploits? Well it was dark, we were badly placed in the audience and Gwen wasn’t keen on the idea and was out of her costume as soon as the last note died away. For somebody as unkeen as she was, she looked remarkably confident and has now experienced the Madonna-style wireless microphone with powerpack on your back belt.

So the picture is instead one of Mia whose duty was to man a pop stall. The school had been running a theme week just prior to the school festival on the topic of Japan. So Mia has her Chinese dress on. Chinese/Japanese – nearly the same!

Mia has taken to scouts/brownies/beavers very enthusiastically and wanted a uniform after two weeks attendance. She signed up immediately to the first weekend camp which took place just North of Grenaa last weekend. We still haven’t properly debriefed her on what happened there because as soon as she got home she lay down on the sofa and slept for four hours and so the moment was lost. But we know that it involved a walk to the beach to do some beachcombing and that one of the scout leaders had her young baby along for the whole thing in true Scandinavian fashion.

There’s another camp planned for the beginning of November and Mia is already signed up!

Picture: Mia eats her mobile phone in an effort to keep the bills down.

Yesterday we were rung up by the deputy head of the girls’ school who said that the staff were going to have a meeting so the girls couldn’t come to school in the morning.

‘So’, enquired Tony, ‘at what time should they come?’

‘You don’t understand, the meeting will last all day.’ replied the deputy head.

”All day?’ repeated a puzzled Tony.

‘We’re on strike! All of us, including the after school club so keep your children at home.’

‘Aaah.’ The penny finally drops.

You can imagine the girls’ reaction. So I stayed home to look after them and we conquered long division into the bargain – something which has been bugging Gwen for years. 

Oh yes, the reason? The council is trying to enact financial savings which will result in every tenth teacher being sacked.

This is Rosemary, our new kitten, who arrived while I was away in Germany. She came from the animal shelter and seems to have been the runt of the litter as she was extremely nervous and tiny when she arrived. We think she is younger than they told us but actually they didn’t know as the mother and litter were dumped on their doorstep. We never did find Hazel again though the door is open should she choose to return.

Getting a cat from the animal shelter is a very good deal as they are delivered treated and sterilised for about £70, a snip compared to what we spent on vaccinations and operations on Hazel. The only drawback is that Rosemary is not old enough to be sterilised so we will have a long journey back to go to the animal shelter vet (it is south of Aarhus).

The weather in Germany, just south of Cologne, was very warm, the beds at the monastery which was our hotel were quite hard. This was the final meeting of this particular project and we ended up discussing what we could try next. But for that we need to do a lot of preparatory work and get our idea (whatever it turns out to be) approved by the EU so the earliest start date for another project with this group would be autumn 2007. We didn’t have that much to do this time as the project team has been very efficient and effective during the previous 3 years of the lifetime of the project and we mainly needed to help with writing the final report.

Mia continues with her violin lessons but has yet to see the value of practising in between lessons. She thinks that Brownies/Beavers is great and we have had to rush out and buy the uniform as she is REALLY COMMITTED! Let’s hope so.

Gwen’s black eye saga has been brought to an end. We finally persuaded the scool that this was an issue worth meeting about and got an apology from the perpetrator. The PTA are taking up the issue of guidelines for when parents should be informed of incidents so we can’t really ask for more though we are convinced that a few ‘misunderstandings’ linger on.

On Saturday we went to the animal shelter to see how you go about getting a cat. They charge about £75 for which you not only get the cat but also one with all its vaccinations and sterilised. Remembering the vets bills from Hazel, that is a very good deal. But we couldn’t take a cat just then because we knew we were going to Legoland the next day and that we will all be away from the house on Thursday and Friday. They seemed a bit annoyed that we wouldn’t take our preferred cat that very instant so we have one reserved but if someone else wants him before we can go and collect him next Saturday then we’ll just have to choose another.

Then we went to Aarhus for the festival. We saw many strange sights including pink bras strung up like bunting in one street. Another strange thing was the marketing ploy by Pilgrim to get us to buy their jewellery. They had samples of their jewellery encased in about six blocks of ice. The picture shows Mia trying to use her finger to melt the ice. Some people seemed to be getting close.

The weather for Legoland was fantastic considering the date. So glad we didn’t go in early August as we had originally planned and when it didn’t stop raining. Gwen was allowed to have her best friend with her as a birthday treat and so Therese came with us.

Mia is now a Brownie and this week is bob a job week so I’m hoping she’ll pick the fruit which is in abundance at the moment. Unfortunately that doesn’t include our hazelnuts of which there don’t seem to be any at all this year.

There are mosquitoes by the thousand though. It’s a very bad year for them and Brownies is always outdoors so Mia got bitten quite a bit tonight after going to Brownies.

Gwen went to Bornholm with her class from Thursday to the following Tuesday. She enjoyed it enormously and recommends that we make a visit as a family. She took over a hundred photos and you can see 11 on our photosite (link is on the newsletter not here as I don’t want to make it too public). On the other hand there were several incidents of varying seriousness including that Gwen received a black eye. Therefore we collected our daughter looking as though she had been in a boxing match. Nobody said anything to us either at the time it occurred or when they returned to our care so I’m afraid that we have been up to the school to complain and phoned both the headmaster and one of Gwen’s teacher after a class session in which it seemed that Gwen’s incident was described as an accident which it most certainly was not. We now wait for the school to act as I don’t think it can be good for Gwen to have her parents continually haranguing the staff.

Meanwhile it was Tony’s birthday last Monday. We had decided to postpone it when we thought he would be home very late that night from Greenland but as we all now know he returned home early. However Gwen wasn’t there so there was still a reason to postpone it. When they discovered at work that Tony had come home early they organised a surprise birthday party on the day in the woods below Kalø¸ where we had a barbecue dinner. That went very well.

The barbecue meal quality was surpassed only by the birthday meal we finally had on Friday at Grenaa where the food was ten cuts above what we normally experience in this part of Denmark.

Two departures and an early return

Yes, he’s back! Tony went to Greenland on Saturday 19th August and was back on Thursday 24th August having failed to do what he set out to do due to bad weather. The weather was bad in Denmark, in Iceland and in Greenland. He and his colleague managed to get to Greenland via Air Greenland but their pilot couldn’t get from Iceland to Greenland because of bad weather and even if he had done, it is doubtful they would have been able to do their aerial surveys because the weather was also bad in Greenland so in the end they pulled the plug and returned early.

On the 19th Mia had her first birthday party with the whole class invited. It seemed to go well but Mia was not happy about so many people in the house.

On Thursday was the big transition day when I first said goodbye to Gwen on the train. She was going on a class trip for 5 days to Bornholm, the Danish island off the coast of Sweden. Then in the afternoon I saw Mia off who was doing an overnight in the local fields with her class (and teachers).

I was just wondering what I was going to do all on my own that night when I got a text message from Tony that he was returning early from Greenland so at 11.30pm I went to collect him at the airport.

This week end we 3 have been attending a world music festival at Grenaa. It is the first time they are doing this and it lasted from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon. We went on Friday and Saturday. It was very good, free of charge and the weather was OK so we wondered why there was never more than about 200 in the audience. Even Nimtofte school can muster more than that on their school festival where doting family have to pay about £5 for the pleasure. The picture shows the measures Mia had to take to cope with the noise level.

I know that my audience is fairly limited today with two families on holiday, one family offline and a fourth with a seldom used dial-up connection. Most of you have heard of our adventures. The picture is from the Motor Stunt show which we saw twice at Disneyland Studios because Gwen’s camera wasn’t working properly and she wanted some pictures. We think it may have been due to the heat as it seems to be working OK now. On the newsletter site you will find a link to a more extensive photo album of the whole 2006 Odyssey.

The main drawback is that Hazel the cat has gone missing. We have put posters up in the local shop and in carefully selected postboxes and she has been spotted by 4 different people but not by us. The longer time goes, the less hopeful we are of being re-united. It seems that there was an almighty cat fight at the place she was lodging while we were away and that is probably what caused her to run away.

This is the interview Zidane gave on tf1 to explain what happened in the final.  It lasts about 13 minutes. (Of course it is in French!).

We girls watched it live (the Cup Final that is) and the famous head butt incident was the topic of sustained conversation over the next few days. They kept hoping that they would find out exactly what the Italian said which could provoke such a strong reaction.