Author: Anne Fox

Tony has just finished overseeing a conference based close to Kalø. Although it is less than an hour’s drive from here, conferences are such time-consuming events that he overnighted there for 4 nights. One of the delegates was a Finn who seems to have been drunk from the moment he set foot on Danish soil until the minute he boarded the plane to fly back to Finland. He was escorted out of the local supermarket by police and gave his talk with everybody wondering whether he would fall over before the end. Apparantly it was a good talk. No-one knows where he spent the first night because he didn’t claim his room key until the next morning. And he was using the airport bar as he prepared to board the early morning flight back to Finland.

Otherwise we had three Russians to lunch and dinner as well as an old friend from WWT days who has lived in Spain for about the same amount of time we have lived in Denmark. We went to stay at his flat in 1995 when Gwen was barely one year old and he came to visit us in our summer house when we went to Southern Spain in about 2000. So we now have some cyrillic script in our guest book.

Boringly, the snow continues. We have had snow in the landscape non-stop since the end of December. I know you all think it is like this every year in Denmark but it isn’t!

Now we must get ready for sunny Spain or at least Spain which is 20 degrees warmer than here. It has been minus 10 at night and the car brakes and gearboxes have been freezing up even though we keep them in the garage.

It is likely that Gwen and Mia will be able to spend a day or part of a day in a Spanish school so it is not all fun for them!

Thursday night Gwen suffered the stomach bug which is doing the rounds. I’ll spare the details but two changes of bedding were needed and she didn’t get much sleep that night so she stayed at home the next day.

Friday Mia went off to girl camp. This is where 200 girls aged between 6 and 12 go to a gym hall half an hours drive away and do gymnastics in their pyjamas. Then they all get their sleeping bags out and go to sleep onthe floor. You won’t be surprised to learn that Mia didn’t get to sleep until 2:0 am. But the next day she learned how to somerault in the air. However by mid-afternoon after being picked up at lunchtime, she was fast asleep on the sofa!

Meanwhile in the adult world, an admin assistant was fired at Anne’s institution because they are losing money. So everyone is asking – who’s next on the list? And over at Kalø the Government have just announced that they will be absorbed into the university system within a couple of years and all the non-scientists are looking at each other and wondering if they will still have a job once the merger takes place. Insecure times.

Review by Mia: Yesterday we were in the cinema to see ‘Nanny McPhee’. It was a really good film. It was about a lady who was called Nanny McPhee . She was a babysitter and the children she had to look after were very naughty children. For example, when the children put a play mouse in the kitchen and then the cook got very frightened and then she backed away and there was a lift thing and there was a boy who had a pan and hit her on the head with the pan. And they put a gag around her mouth and made all sorts of things.

  

 

Review by Gwen: Last night we went to the cinema and saw the film Nanny McPhee . It was about a noisy household with 7 children, a father, no mother, a cook and a maid. They had already frightened away 17 nannies and they were sure that this one would be just as easy to scare away. But they were in for a surprise because Nanny McPhee can do magic. The first morning they pretended to be ill then Nanny McPhee made them ill for real and stuck them to their beds. She’s not really bad. She just wants to teach them some manners. And it was really good!

 

 

 
 

 

I must admit to feeling a little self-conscious waving into nothingness but we had Tony on the phone and he took this magnificent sepia-toned picture to record this event for posterity. We later found out that there were at least two other households in the audience. We never did manage to spot where the camera was located though.

Indeed we do all deserve the title of skier. Me, after an interval of about 30 years, found that I was not too decrepit to start again and finished the break actually carrying cargo while ski-ing. And the two girls after a 45 minute lesson were unstoppable. Admittedly this all took place on the real nursery slopes but no matter. We did it! Again and again and again. And they want to come back next year. Well, next week preferably. The picture shows Mia ski-ing with utter confidence.

There are a couple more pictures on the family newsletter website – just make sure you scroll down enough. There is also a video of Gwen and Mia in action on that website.  Thanks to those who turned up for the webcam rendez-vous. Tony has pictorial evidence of this somewhere which I may add either here or on the newsletter page when I find it.

Well it’s half term now and for the last three years I have been promising the girls we would try a bit of ski-ing. And now, right at the last minute we have booked a lightening visit to Norway. We sail tonight from Hirtshals arriving in Norway at Kristiansand (nowhere near Oslo). We then have two days of snow activity before sailing back Wednesday evening.

We are going to the Telemark area, more precisely Gautefall. You can see it all here http://www.gautefall.no/  Click on ‘webcam’ or this link     http://81.31.236.60/view/view.shtml?imagePath=/mjpg/video.mjpg&size=1 to really see the area around the hotel.

We are going to try and find the webcam and stand in front of it at 8pm our time which is 7pm your time tomorrow. It will be dark by that time but the whole area is well illuminated. We will try to position ourselves in front of the chair lift. You may have to click on pan right when you get there. The camera seems to start on the extreme left by default. We don’t know if clicking on pan right or pan left actually physically moves the camera in Gautefall. The picture was sometimes moving when we weren’t asking it to yesterday. So that means that if more than one person is looking at the webcam from the computer at the same time, only one of those people is in charge of the camera. When we looked at the webcam last night there was absolutely no-one about. Maybe there is a good reason why everyone is indoors but otherwise we will try to keep this appointment.

This is what is concerning Danes at the moment http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4656664.stm

Added February 16, 2006: The above is a model example of an irrelevant post.

A few evenings ago all the trees were heavy with an iced glaze.

The snow is doing all sorts of interesting things at the moment. Today it gave all the trees thorns as the picture shows. This is a hazel tree which normally does not have thorns.

You’ll never guess who dropped by today!

Listen here.