Author: Anne Fox

While Anne was in Germany for an EU project meeting Mia was off with a friend to the first day opening of the local theme park to try out their new attraction. She reported that it wasn’t very scary but we later found out that it wasn’t running at full speed yet. Meanwhile Tony and Gwen went to the Scandinavian animal park where the new attraction is a collection of polar bears (rescued from various unsuitable zoos and exhibiting some nervous behaviour). The polar bears have 600 tons of ice made for them daily but here they are just frolicking in the water. Gwen thinks the park ought to get some lynxes next and had a chance to tell the owner this as he was around. He told her it was on his list but he has to wait until suitable individuals turn up as they don’t take any of their animals from the wild.

We did have one very hot week but this wasn’t it. But as soon as one little ray of sunshine showed itself the girls set up the hammock outside. Last week we had a parent’s evening for Mia’s class which included a slide show of approximately 345 photographs taken during the school year. This took about 45 minutes to get through and included shots of them cooking things over an open fire, sculpting wood with knives, chopping wood with axes, trampolining on the Fox trampoline and making fire by rubbing two pieces of wood together as well as making flints (the only picture with safety equipment in evidence).

Now it is cold and wet and Tony is going off on a goose catch which he thinks has little chance of success because the weather is bad and it is too late in the season.

PS. Always take what Tony says with a pinch of salt and leaven it up on the optimistic side. They caught the most birds ever.

Tomorrow Gwen won’t be coming home as the fifth years at the school in Kolind are coming to Nimtofte and they are all going to sleep on the floor of the gym until Thursday. This is all part of a long term effort to get the year cohort to get to know each other before the Nimtofte cohort go over to Kolind in a year’s time. There the year will be mixed up and divided into about three classes.

Anne is going to Germany for 3 days starting  off tomorrow evening for yet another EU meeting. We run the virtual meetings for this project. Meanwhile in Grenaa the two course centres are going to merge. This is apparantly very much an opportunity rather than a threat. We shall see. Today we had a long session where the two staff complements were meant to get to know each other prior to working with each other from August on. Come to think of it, this sounds very much like Gwen’s event on Wednesday except that we were allowed to go home after dinner!

The daffodils are in full flower at Grenaa, the temperatures are high at the moment but many trees still don’t have leaves so it feels a bit strange to be sweltering under bare trees.

Denmark is probably one of the few European countries not to have a bank holiday on May 1st (or nearest Monday there till).  Gwen and Mia were to be found at serious risk of having one school day too many recently and were given the day off school at about two weeks notice. Unfortunately both Anne and Tony had meetings and other important matters to attend to (such as today being the deadline for handing in income tax declarations) so the girls could not stay home.  Both got invites to spend the day with friends who live in fact across the road from each other. So they got there rather early for a social visit as Tony had to be at an 8am meeting anyway and by all accounts had a great day playing computer games, cuddling some new born kittens, brushing down a couple of horses owned by one of the friends and hopping about on the trampoline of the other girl. Gwen somehow managed to get two ice creams during the day; a perk of having divorced parents who don’t know what the other parent has dished out, I gather.

We went to get our gossip mag with wrong TV schedules and some milk from the local supermarket today and they had changed everything around. Gwen and I didn’t even realise until we had got to the back of the shop. But when Gwen realised she was very annoyed.

Both girls have just been given in-liners (roller skates to me) and since the sun has finally come out this year they have been practising on them like mad. Mia flies around on them while Gwen is still rather hesitant.

Mia keyed in and illustrated the notice which was copied and sent to all parents in the school today. Meanwhile Gwen was teaching the younger pupils about steam engines. She was satisfied with the behaviour of her class but noticed that the girls were rather uninterested in the whole thing while the boys were bombarding her with questions.

The girls also go to the neighbour to walk their dogs. Ever since a new landowner in the vicinity took umbrage at the dogs being in his woods (which have hunting rights) our neighbours have felt compelled to have their dogs locked up most of the day and are grateful for anyone who is willing to give them a run. There is no convenient enclosed garden or yard so they spend most of their day locked in the horse stables.

Gwen and Mia have been visiting our neighbour to see the new foal who was born this week.

Meanwhile the grownups have been watching the whole of the first series of Green Wing back to back. Yes it’s rude and in terribly bad taste but very funny.

It is only just beginning to dawn on us how big the development just down the road is going to be. The new golf centre has been having open days over Easter so people can see what it is all about and how far they have got. The picture above is one of the summer houses which have been selling like hotcakes. We have also been getting quite a few displaced vistors because they seem to have printed the address as number 52 on the paper brochures people are using to get to the place and so we have had quite a few disoriented people stopping at our door wondering why there isn’t a golf course in our garden. Everyone except Anne has now been to see the development and got free sausages and beer into the bargain.

The hotel was great (the picture shows the indoor courtyards), the weather was perfect, there were flowers in profusion and the travel arrangements all went smoothly. The frogs were very vociferous in the hotel ponds and I wish I had brought my tennis raquet with me to take advantage of the dozen or so courts within the hotel grounds. I’m afraid that I did watch an Abba tribute act which then became a Boney M tribute act. Had nothing better to do.

I had been invited to give a talk and actually the rest of the conference was quite interesting as I can probably use what I learned there in one of the projects I am now suddenly in charge of. The conference was about peer mentoring and one of the projects had been about a Welsh secondary school which had trained some of its older pupils to be mentors to students from a local school for the mentally disabled. So people from both those groups were also at the conference which I thought was a great experience for them. There were also young peer mentors and mentees from Ireland and Portugal.

There were also about 5 students from Swansea FE college (Gorseinon) to help with the conference organising. They were the same type of students I used to teach in Cheltenham. I asked one of them how they had chosen who went on the conference and he replied it was simply those with the highest grades.

Before Mallorca I had been to a 2 day conference in Northern Denmark about IT developments. I forgot my coat in the hotel wardrobe and thought that was the end of it. But they sent it back to me free of charge so I don’t have to buy a new one after all which I’m very grateful for.

Now it is the Easter holiday and we have no specific plans about what to do during this week.

The photograph is one we generated using the Google earth program of Leon.

We have been back now for almost a week. It was a busy period starting Sunday night when we arrived in Leon. We stayed at Vera’s house, the Irish lady who lives in Spain and organised the whole week on top of looking after us. Tony and the girls were able to use Vera’s third car while Anne was pre-occuppied with meetings and teaching.

The occasion was a project meeting for www.teaching-culture.de where two courses are being piloted for teachers from all over Europe. This was the residential week after they have been working online since last October. After Leon they will be trying out lesson ideas for the next three months. So we were a large group of partners, students and family.

Meanwhile Tony and the girls went to a stuffed animal museum which is much better than it sounds. They also visited some caves in the mountains. Mia was a little reticent beforehand but agreed to go in the end and had a great time. Gwen and Mia also went to a Spanish school for a couple of hours. It is a school where they teach through the medium of English 40% of the time so Mia was doing science while Gwen was following one of the teachers and being questioned by the Spanish children about Denmark and so on.

The Spanish tempo was difficult to adjust to with lunch at about 3pm, dinner at 8.30 (too early for the Spanish so the restaurants were empty at this time) and late nights and early starts.

Life carries on apace. Tony was at a BTO meeting in Thetford today and Mia is staying overnight at a friends. Tomorrow Mia is taking part in a gymnastics display to mark the end of her gym classes which she has been doing on Wednesday evenings. Gwen is going to 2 birthday parties in the next week and Anne is going to a 2-day conference in northern Denmark on Monday and then giving a talk at conference in Mallorca at the end of the week. We should be all together again by Saturday evening April 1st.