Generation Gap

I am Dutch, and we Dutch are not very polite, at least not in the eyes of some other peoples. Maybe it’s because we are known throughout the world as a hard-working no-nonsense sort of people, who can’t be bothered with polite niceties like “excuse me” and “please” but this is never a problem with other Dutch people, because they behave just the same, apart from old crones like me who can still not get used to the way people behave nowadays.

I blame the soap series, really. We have on in particular here called “Goede Tijden, Slechte Tijden” (Good Times, Bad Times) and when I got back into teaching 11 or 12 years ago I was slightly amazed at the language the students were using. When I discovered what their favourite soap was I decided to watch a few times and found out the language there was just as bad as what I heard at school. Of course I realized I was by that time reaching the top of the hill, so I decided I was not letting it get me down, but I decided there and then that I would never stoop to using such language myself.

Now that I’m over the hill I still hold true to that principle en funny enough the young whippersnappers seem to accept that from me too. We have agreed to disagree, so to speak and I realized there will always be a generation gap, which is as it should be.

I remember when I was about 15 my father was in his early 50s like I am now and he had ideas and did things I could never imagine me doing ever in my life. And so right I was. I still don’t do the things he did, even now that I am the same age as he was then, because whatever has happened in the meantime I am still of a different generation than he was at the time.

I’m wearing clothes my mum wouldn’t have wanted to be seen dead in and I will never ever wear the stuff she was wearing when she was my age. When I was younger I always had this terrible vision of having to end up like my mum, with tightly permed curls and good conservative clothes, which make you look like 110 even if you are still 50.

So when I look at my students and hear them talk their way nowadays, I just smile and remember how absolutely horrified my parents were when I used the word “shit” for the first time in my life. Of course, when my mum was watching The Towering Inferno and heard Steve McQueen say the same thing, she thought it was rather funny. Double standards no doubt, because she probably thought something like that was rather funny for a guy, but it was not at all ladylike.

Now when going to London with a group of fifteen year old students, like I do every year, it’s always very hard to bring it home to them that the things that are quite acceptable here in Holland are not done in England, well, at least not where my generation is concerned. For instance, here it is perfectly acceptable to shout out the word f*** at the slightest mishap (except I should add in my classroom) and every year it takes everything I got to persuade them not to use it once we cross the Channel. Every year I seem to succeed and they don’t use it (at least not when I’m present), but last year on our school trip the worst thing happened.

It was a drizzly Sunday afternoon and we had arranged to go to Camden Town to visit the markets, which is always a great experience to everyone. We usually give the students an hour or two to have a good look around before the coach returns and this time it was no different than any other year.

We instructed the students to stay together in small groups, hold on to their bags and not do anything we wouldn’t do and sent them off. We settled down in a noisy pub because anything is better than the hustle and bustle of a crowded market and awaited everyone’s return while enjoying a nice pint and a pub meal.

By five o’clock everyone started returning, the coach arrived on time and everything seemed to have been going without a glitch, until the last group of boys returned with the biggest one in the lead sporting an enormous grin.

“I have a new tattoo!” he grinned proudly.

At first I thought he was making a joke, thinking he had one of those stick-on things that come off in the shower, but then he pulled up the sleeve of his tee-shirt and I could see he had a real one, a big black letter “F”, for his favourite football club Feijenoord.

I got visions of livid parents coming to school bearing hatchets to decapitate every teacher they could lay their hands on and the only thing I could think of uttering was: “F*************!!!”

Suddenly the verbal generation gap was not so big anymore after all!

Summer Fun

The last Monday before the summer holidays. 90 degrees in the shade and I’m awfully glad I brought my straw hat. Funny enough my students don’t laugh when I put it on in the sweltering heat. They even look a bit envious. Good. I’m envious of their perfect bodies, their perfect tans, their perfect teeth and the fact that they are allowed to show so much naked flesh nowadays without feeling at all uncomfortable. Even if I had a perfect body I would never feel at ease like that.

My parents, especially my mother, came from a strictly religious background, and when I was young even wearing trousers wasn’t really done; at least not when you had to go to school, although it was something else when we went on holiday to the seaside. There we were allowed to wear shorts or even bathing suits.

Oh, that very first bathing suit! I remember it was red with a little white sailing boat stitched on the front. My mother had knitted it herself. Just think of it, a knitted woolen bathing suit. Of course it was a perfect fit until you went into the water, because then it began to sag. When you came out of the sea the thing was so saturated with water that the bottom immediately dropped down to the back of your knees and the whole thing filled with water as well so that you looked like an over-sized red bumble bee. With a super large bottom like that the shoulder straps became twice as long and the top dropped down to your waist. I know, I was three or four, so that didn’t really matter, but it must have been a funny sight.

Fortunately my dad never took a picture of that, because pictures at that time always had to be perfect. Film was expensive and prints too, so every picture had to be posed for and me and my sister had to stand for hours in the same position until my dad had got the lighting right. This usually made me look stiff and stilted, while sis often looked fuzzy, because she didn’t like to stand still for a long time.

When I got older, I got my first real bathing suit. Dark blue with white seagulls. I remember it very well, because I was so happy with it. It was made of some new-fangled spandex, nylon with a bit of elastic woven through and, oh great miracle, your bottom now remained perfectly covered. I never became a big fan of swimming, mainly because the water was rather wet and I didn’t like sand getting everywhere, but swimming costumes were never the problem anymore.

Although, there was my first bikini. Orange that one was. It wouldn’t have been all that bad, if the inside of the bra hadn’t been made of some kind of plastic that became hard as a rock when it got cold and wet in the water. Now that was really uncomfortable, beside the fact that bikinis were never my cup of tea. The material it was made of was not like it is nowadays and the thing still lost much of its shape in the water, so it was very easy to lose the bikini bottom while swimming, or finding your bra covering your ears like great big orange earmuffs when you jumped into the water.

No, I never developed a great fondness for swimming and now that I’m over the hill and will probably never be able to see my feet again, I know I will not possess a bathing suit ever again. I do like to be beside the seaside now and again, properly covered up however, preferably in a sort of tent of ginormous proportions, a big hat and loads of suntan oil factor 2000. 

Summer Holidays 2010 10: The Magic Roundabout

“Don’t you find driving on the left-hand side of the road is terribly hard?” a friend of mine asked, just before I was leaving for my holidays in Wiltshire last summer.

“Actually, it isn’t,” I told him, and of course I was right, for driving on the left is not nearly as difficult as you would think. This is mainly the result of the fact that on most roads (apart from the narrowest country roads) you either have right of way or you haven’t,  and when there is a complicated junction they build a roundabout.

Everyone on the roundabout has right of way, so that’s easy enough to remember and at the bigger ones they usually put traffic lights as well so that makes it even easier. It takes a bit of getting used to the very small roundabouts that consist of nothing more than a big white dot in the middle of the crossing, but after two or three narrow escapes because you did something wrong, you quickly feel confident enough to brave anything in the British road system. That is, until one eventful day you have to pass through Swindon and discover the by all Brits dreaded Magic Roundabout.

The adjective Magic has not been added lightly as you will soon discover that you need all the magic powers of Gandalf and Dumbledore combined to be able to cross it. I’m sure the dangerous Mines of Moria or the slopes of Caradhras are not nearly as scary as having to cross here. The whole thing was probably conceived after a night’s hard drinking while still under the influence of the mother of all hangovers. I’m sure that if they had built something like that at Dover or Harwich, no foreigner would ever have dared venture entering England again.

The roundabout consists of a combination of no less than six roundabouts at a junction of five roads. When you have to go straight on you have to find a kind of zigzag route past at least three of the white dots.

The first time I had to accomplish this feat I think I must have just pressed the accelerator and closed my eyes, only opening them again when I miraculously arrived safely on the other side, the sound of blaring car horns still ringing in my ears. I took a detour on the way home and am not planning to go there ever again.

Funny enough not many accidents happen on the Magic Roundabout, because I think not even the locals have been able to figure out how to negotiate it, so everyone probably drives extremely carefully (except the odd foreigner who is completely out of his depth).

No, driving on the left is not hard at all, that is as long as you can manage to avoid Swindon, or the M25, or the circular road around Cambridge (where I once spent an exciting two hours trying to get off, never managing to find Cambridge proper). I’m already looking forward to the fateful day when I will not be able to avoid passing something called Spaghetti Junction, something to be experienced near Birmingham, I believe.

No, I don’t mind driving on the left, but there are some places I avoid at all costs.

Summer Holidays 2010 9: Lilliput Library

I was totally amazed when Sue, the owner of my holiday cottage told me about the lending library in the village of All Cannings where she lives. It was a Sunday afternoon and we were pleasantly full after an excellent lunch she had prepared for us. I have been staying in one of her holiday cottages for years now and our little get-togethers have become a kind of tradition when I’m staying with her. Keith, her husband, had gone down to the lake at the back of the converted barn where they live, to help one of the other guests and Sue and I had been having tea and a good natter about all things menopause and other assorted stuff you don’t want men to hear about, when the subject changed to reading. She knows I love books and she asked me if I had bought anything interesting during my stay this time.

There was a time when I bought myself at least the equivalent of a suitcase full of books when I went to England, but that was years ago when you could still buy Penguin paperbacks for 25p. And then there were of course the romantic mysteries we used to love when we were teenagers. The stacks I bought of those taught me a lot about the language so they definitely served their purpose even though they were always read only once and then discarded and passed on to other lovers of romances.

Nowadays I’m a bit more discriminating in my choices and the British book prices have become the same as the Dutch so there is no real reason anymore to bring books from England, but I still love to browse, especially when I’m on my own. Here in Holland I never have so much time to do that at leisure. So after the holidays I still bring home books in pretty large quantities.

When the subject turned to books Sue asked me if I had seen the library in the main street of All Cannings. I must have looked rather puzzled.

“Didn’t you see the telephone box there?” she asked me.

I told her I knew where it was but I had to confess I had seen nothing resembling a library there.

“The phone box is the library,” she said.

“The phone box?” I must have look really stupid.

She nodded. “When it wasn’t used anymore because everyone has a mobile phone nowadays the box itself was left. Nobody had thought of taking it down, or maybe they thought it would look really British in the middle of the village like that. One of the ladies who lives close by thought it a pity that it wasn’t used for anything anymore so she thought it would be a good idea to turn it into some sort of book exchange. You can go and lend books from the box and you can leave books you don’t want anymore. I believe you can even stamp them with the date.”

I know the British can be a bit eccentric now and again, but I’d never heard anything like this before, so the next day I took my camera and inspected the telephone box. It’s a pity I didn’t spot anyone who wanted to bring or take books when I was there. It would have been really nice to learn what people thought of the initiative. Something for the Guinness Book of Records perhaps? 

Summer Holidays 2010 8: An Englishman's Home is his Castle

Longleat Safari Park

…….. and sometimes an Englishman can make a real castle his home. However, when death duties in the UK became so much of a burden that selling the ancestral home seemed the only option, there were a few owners who thought up some novel idea to keep their places in the family.

One of them was the 6th Marquess of Bath who opened his home Longleat in Wiltshire to the public and converted part of the grounds into a safari park. And it worked. Nowadays Longleat is a thriving business and people come from all over the world to visit the house and grounds (and maybe catch a glimpse of the colourful 7th Marquess, who plays a very active role in the business). When his father was alive and he was still the Lord Weymouth and an art student, he started decorating his then private apartments, which can also be visited at certain times. Nowadays there is a special tour for children, but to see it all, you must be over 18, as a great number of murals and other artworks are inspired by the Kama Sutra.

The one time I felt compelled to visit, our small group of nosy tourists was shown around the place by a very prim looking English lady in a pink cardigan and a soft blue perm, who blushed every time she had to explain everything about yet another naughty wall. I don’t remember much of it, apart from it all being very colourful and my friends and I were constantly stifling bouts of the giggles because everyone was so very uptight about it all, in particular the pink guide who was clearly terribly embarrassed all the time. It would probably have been much more interesting if the then Lord Weymouth had done the guiding himself.

However, one thing (literally) still stands out in my mind and that was the bedroom with a gigantic four-poster bed with embedded in the headboard an enormous wooden penis. It was about the size of my arm. The poor guide didn’t know where to look and I vaguely remember her telling us that the Lord Weymouth was inspired to it all after his trip to India. I could only think that the thing was in a terribly awkward place and the only use for it I could think of was that it would make a nice stand for a reading lamp.

Every time I see a picture of the 7th Marquess (the former Lord Weymouth), who now looks like a big jolly leprechaun, or when I’m watching an episode of the BBC series about Longleat, that enormous bed and its attachment still springs to mind. It’s like one of those irritating little pieces of music you just can’t get out of your head.

Highclere Castle

The owners of Highclere Castle in Berkshire were a bit different. They managed to keep going partly because of the fact that their famous ancestor, Lord Carnarvon, discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamun in Egypt and in the cellars there is now a small museum with Egyptian artefacts, a real mummy and some items Carnarvon himself took to Egypt. When you look at what there was in his medicine chest you can finally understand why it’s no wonder he contracted blood poisoning after having been stung on the cheek by a mosquito. The story goes that his dog died at Highclere at the exact same moment Carnarvon died in Cairo. It does make you wonder about the curse of the pharaohs somehow.

Thousands of tourists find their way to the castle every year and if you have enough money you can hire the place for weddings and other festive occasions. If you are a lover of television you will probably have see it plenty of times, because the house and grounds are frequently used in films and series when a stately home us needed. Actually, it’s not a bad way to make a living and to help keep the ancestral home in the family.

One of the places that grows on you is Bowood House in the middle of the Wiltshire countryside. Once you get past the children’s playground, where screaming primary schoolers sound like they are all individually slaughtered in the most horrible ways imaginable, you find the house at the end of a narrow footpath. Just at the moment when you start thinking there is no house there at all, the path makes a turn and the ground drops steeply and there it is, much lower than you would expect a house like this to be, the formal gardens giving way to grassy slopes leading down to one of the lakes. The grounds were designed by that greatest of all landscape gardeners, Capability Brown.

The house is full of surprises. A small ante-room to the library used to be the laboratory where Dr Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen gas. The library behind it was designed by Robert Adam in neo-classical style. It looks so comfortable that you could easily spend a fortnight here without ever feeling the need to go out at all. On the second floor you can find a collection of late nineteenth-century treasures brought back from India and Burma by the 5th Marquess, who was Viceroy from 1888 to 1894. On the Top Exhibition Room there is a collection of Napoleonic treasures, including one of Napoleon’s death masks, that came into the family through Emily de Flahault, the wife of the 4th Marquess. Her father, Charles, Comte de Flahault, was Napoleon’s aide-de-camp, who accompanied the Emperor on his later European campaigns.

In my time I visited quite a few stately homes, castles and country seats. They hardly ever disappoint, especially not when you like to take a step back into history. There is nothing that manages to convey the sense of Englishness like a stately home. There it’s very easy to imagine yourself back in the days of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, or in the middle of an Agatha Christie murder mystery, although I myself have never come across a dead body yet.

The Library at Bowood House

If you'd like to learn more about the stately homes mentioned above, go to:
 
http://www.longleat.co.uk/
http://www.highclerecastle.co.uk/
http://www.bowood-house.co.uk/

Summer Holidays 2010 7: The Call of the Wild

Highclere Castle

When I visited Highclere Castle, the home of the Earl of Carnarvon (yes, the descendant of the one who found King Tut’s tomb), I was pleasantly surprised when I saw a deer cross the road in front of the car. There was never any danger of hitting it, because I was on private land and not allowed to drive any faster than 10 miles per hour so I got a really good chance to look at it. Unfortunately it disappeared fairly quickly into the undergrowth or I would have taken a picture of it. Still, it was a very nice experience for someone who spends her whole life living in a city.

I love spotting animals in the wild like that. A bit later I saw a squirrel and even though it was just an ordinary grey one it was still a good sighting. However, things are a bit different when the wildlife suddenly invades your home.

The cottage in Wiltshire where I was staying is a great place. Small, but it has everything, from a fully equipped kitchen to a flat screen telly with a DVD-player and, oh great joy, this time also a (albeit slightly wonky) wi-fi connection, which saved me a lot of lugging a laptop all over the place at awkward times.

But this time I had some wildlife invading the place. Not the odd fly, wasp or spider (which can be nasty enough, but hey, you’re in the country) and not the crushed snail that had somehow managed to wedge itself between the front door and the threshold without me noticing and which made a nasty smear on the doormat, but when I came home one afternoon I discovered an army of ants marching across the kitchen floor.

My first impulse was to stamp on them but that didn’t make any real impression because for every dead one several others took its place so I decided heavier stuff was needed. Off to the landlady I went who gave me a few of those boxes that attract ants and then kill them. We put a few out on the kitchen floor and hoped that would do the trick. For good measure I stamped on a few more, making the kitchen floor look more and more like a battlefield.

I settled down on the couch with a good book and was well into it when the first flying ant made an appearance. The weather was close and there was a storm brewing and that probably brought it out, and besides, there was only one and I could easily deal with that. I simply hit it over the head with the book, making an end to that problem. It was a pity it left a smear on the cover, but as the saying goes, you can’t make a cake without breaking some eggs and I was not going to spend a night in a cottage with flying ants all over the place. I cleaned the cover of the book and settled down again.

Not five minutes later I spied a full cohort of ants marching across the floor. I swear you could hear their tiny feet stamping all over the tiles. I pondered the problem for a few seconds and then thought it would be a good idea to Hoover them up.

It was indeed a wonderful idea, however it only worked for a few minutes, until they walked out of the back of the Hoover and because I was now in the bedroom I had ants all over the floor there as well.

It was clear I needed heavier artillery than those little boxes, but I was reluctant to use the anti-bug spray. That stuff is toxic (well, it does kill ants) and I didn’t feel like spraying it around and having to sleep in the fumes.

I opened one cupboard after another with the vague idea that I might find something I could use but I got a very nasty shock when I opened a bottom cupboard and a virtual legion of ants came streaming out. That was it. Countryside or not I was not going to bed with such an amount of creepy crawlies around, so out came the bug spray. It didn’t smell too bad after all.

I’m very fond of certain types of wildlife, but not when it’s crawling around my kitchen.

Picture thanks to http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/

More about Highclere Castle you can find at: http://www.highclerecastle.co.uk/
If you want to rent a nice cottage in Wiltshire, go to:  http://www.rendellsfarmcottages.com/  All the ants are gone now.

Summer Holidays 2010 6: Tourists at Avebury and Stonehenge

I confess I’m a tourist myself and I like doing touristy things, like visiting musea, stately homes, small towns and villages, churches and, when in Wiltshire, places like Stonehenge and Avebury; and most touristlike at all, I like taking lots of photographs. Don’t get me wrong, I really like people, but there are times I’d just rather sit in a field and listen to the cows.

The "I'd rather wear a Speedo in Ibiza" bloke

The world is my office

Queen Mum lookalike

Serious photographer

Part-time New Agers

Thank God we can take the kids out for a day so they will be too tired to be annoying to the rest of the neighbourhood

Europe in 8 days and 800 photographs

My friends went to Ibiza and all theygot me was this lousy tattoo

Sheepz in Avebury - Ur doin it rite

Sheepz in Avebury - Ur doin it rong

Can you all see my back hair?

We have been around since the 60s and we're not about to leave ...

The Really Cultural Couple - Ur doin it rite

The Really Cultural Couple - Ur doin it rong

Why do some people look like they'd much rather be somewhere else?

The born-again Iron Age lady

Summer Holidays 2010 5: This Sporting Life

They say that to truly understand British culture and the British way of life you should be able to understand everything there is to know about cricket. Well, bummer! That means I don’t understand anything about the British at all! I’ve heard about a wicket, stumps and ashes and I believe sometimes someone calls out: “Howzat!”, and I’ve seen people playing cricket on Saturday afternoons, usually on lovely summer’s days when the sound of the ball on the bat can be heard miles away and the only other sounds are those made by bees flying from flower to flower in the eco-friendly borders of the cricket field, but that’s where it ends. I have no idea what they’re doing, only that it takes a long time.

It’s always men playing it seems. I’ve never heard of an all-women cricket team, but that doesn’t mean a thing because as I said, I don’t know anything about the game at all. So I decided to do some research, because in my job you really need to understand the British way of life, and of course I found out all about it on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket . Still don’t understand much of it unfortunately. Maybe the reason is that my mind started wandering about halfway through the article.

The game sounds simple enough, just like any other ballgame really, but why are the British so fascinated by the game? Or by any other game come to think of it?

It’s probably me. I have a big problem understanding any game involving a bunch of men (with or without bats or rackets) running about after balls that have to be caught or kicked into goals, hurting or maiming as many opponents as they can in the process and trying to look at death’s door when an opponent treats them in the same way.

It seems the British are obsessed with sports and I am not.

Does this mean that I will never understand British culture? Maybe, but it may just mean that I won’t be able to understand the particular part of British culture that involves sports. Do I really care? Actually, no. Actually, I’m really proud of the fact that I don’t understand anything about sports and why most people are so obsessed by it.

There. I’ve said it. So shoot me.

Summer Holidays 2010 4: Good Manners

When I was still in high school, a long, long time ago, and later when I was studying English, I was taught that English people have very good manners. They queue when they have to wait at a bus stop, they patiently wait their turn in shops and they are all extremely polite. Now apart from odd exceptions like lager louts on holiday in Ibiza and the occasional a***hole who tries to jump a queue and whom the other people in self-same queue start complaining about loudly once the culprit has disappeared, I found this all to be very true.

Today I had to do some grocery shopping and I thought it would be nice to treat myself to the Waitrose-experience. Of course everything there is vastly overpriced, but the shop is light and big, the aisles are wide and the assortment of goods you can get there is very extensive. I love the way the salespeople are dressed, not so much the ones at the tills, but especially the people at the fish, meat and bread counters. Whoever thought of making them wear those silly white hats? And the ladies as well?

I can understand that from a hygienic perspective people who handle food have to wear some kind of headgear, something that covers the hair completely, but silly hats like that? And especially the ladies have a way of wearing those silly things without covering their hair really. When a waist-long ponytail comes down from under the hat the purpose is totally defeated if you ask me.

After my little excursion through the shop I arrived at the till behind a little old lady who looked like the late Queen Mum. She was taking her time paying for her shopping while the cashier patiently waited until she had put her enormous handbag down, carefully opened the zipper, took out a little purse, discovered she didn’t have enough change, put the purse back in the handbag, found a bigger purse, produced a credit card, fiddled with card in the machine, forgot her pin code, found a little book in the handbag with the pin code written inside, entered the pin code three times (did it wrong the first two times), put away the credit card in the big purse and the purse in the handbag, nearly forgot the little book with the pin code, asked for a carrier bag, started putting the groceries in the bag one by one, found out she did it the wrong way and repacked everything at leisure.

Now I’m a teacher and as such you have to be of a very patient disposition, but this tested even me. The waiting itself was not so bad, but the problem was I needed to find a ladies’ room very badly. It is unfortunately very true that when you get to certain age you do really need to go more often. But I was in England and there was nothing for it but bite my lower lip, stiffen my upper lip and exercise my pelvic floor muscles until it was my turn and I was literally bursting. However, I managed to reach the ladies’ in time.

This little anecdote describes very well the British state of mind. It doesn’t matter who or what is waiting, when it’s your turn, it’s your turn and you can take your time.

How different it will be when I get back to The Netherlands. The last time I was at a supermarket there, I was nearly pushed away by the woman behind me. I’d just paid but my groceries were still on the belt as it is physically impossible to pay and at the same time pack your groceries. Of course the belt was not in operation, so I had to shove everything to the end of it, but while I was trying to do that as quickly as I could, the woman behind me was clearly getting impatient and started pushing her cart against the back of my legs. Giving her a deadly stare didn’t make any impression at all.

Maybe she was in a hurry; maybe someone needed her urgently; maybe she was a woman of a certain age as well and she needed to pee, but actually I don’t think it was any of that. I think she was just being Dutch. And being Dutch means speaking very loudly in company so everyone can hear how interesting and intelligent you are, push yourself to the head of the queue in the unlikely event of there being one at all and trying to run over every co-shopper while in a supermarket.

I’ll enjoy the British manners patiently for as long as my holidays last and next time I have to go to the supermarket I’ll just visit the ladies’ first.

Picture thanks to www.seafoodtraining.org

Summer Holidays 2010 3: Food, Glorious Food

Tea and scones, photograph by Jeremy Keith from Britghton and Hove

When I first went to England nearly 45 years ago, food was a bit of a problem. My dad had had stomach problems for years and needed a very specific diet, so because the only thing we knew about English food was that it was horrible compared to any other type of food in the world (as told to us by the same people that know it always rains in England), on that first memorable holiday my mum took enough food from Holland for my dad to survive on for a week or two.

There was of course the problem of where we were going to stay. We had no experience with travelling abroad and because of my dad’s illness we wanted to keep the journey itself as short as possible so for that first holiday we decided to stay as close to Dover as possible and we rented a big old rambling place in the middle of Deal, at that time a quiet seaside town where hardly anybody ever spent their holidays.

We’d never stayed in a house that big before, so even that was an adventure, especially the going to the toilet in the middle of the night, because the bedrooms were upstairs and the toilet was far, far away, down an immense flight of stairs. The bathroom consisted basically of a long corridor with the toilet itself at the very end of it and a window right behind. I was 15, my sister a year younger and we brought a friend of hers, who was a few years older and had just started work as a French teacher at the school we both attended. It was very easy for the three of us to get really worked up over nothing. Of course we told each other all kinds of scary stories in which axe murderers behind toilet windows played a prominent part, so the only way any of us dared to go down in the middle of the night was if we could all go down together. Needless to say we had a great time.

It was a good thing, however, that my mum had had the foresight to take so much food, because whatever there was to be had in the village shops was nothing my dad was allowed to have. Vegetables were limited to cucumbers, cauliflowers, onions, tomatoes and potatoes and of course there were always tinned baked beans. Because my mum didn’t feel like doing much cooking we feasted on cucumber, potatoes and beef one day and baked beans, potatoes and beef the next, while my dad got the diet stuff she’d brought from home. Not really such a bad diet for a few weeks, but after a few days of baked beans flatulence hit the household and that was rather an inconvenience. Fortunately it was a warm summer and we could keep the windows open all day.

When we got older and were allowed in pubs, we found out that pub food was a better way of staying alive especially when my dad wasn’t around, and the added advantage was that you never had to do the dishes.

Nowadays you can get the same food all over Europe. The big supermarkets all sell more or less the same things, sometimes under a different brand name, but if you want to you can prepare the same food during your holidays as you would at home if you wanted or needed to.

However, that’s not what I want when I’m in England. I always like to have the British things, like lamb in mint sauce, fish and chips and scones and clotted cream for tea.

For tea and scones you can of course visit one of Ye Olde Teashoppes (usually given a name like that by some big chain) and if you’re lucky you might get a decent cup of tea and a halfway fresh scone, but more often than not the tea is made by dangling a teabag in hot water and the scone is made the day before and if you were to drop it inadvertently on someone’s head it would instantly kill him.

The other alternative is to visit the Caen Locks in Devizes, a flight of 29 locks in the Kennet and Avon Canal, where there is a small refreshment shop that sells the most amazing scones and real tea.

Of course, the British have many more wonderful dishes and the days when people were right about the British food being atrocious are long gone. Maybe British food is not all that refined, but I certainly enjoy it enormously when it’s well prepared.

Caen Locks, Devizes

More about the Caen Locks can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caen_Hill_Locks.

More about British food can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_cuisine and http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/customs/questions/food/index.htm .

If you like to try out some recipes you can find most of the best British cooking in: Traditional British Cooking, Consultant Editor: Hilaire Walden. Published by Hermes House. I was able to get it for only £3.99.

Summer Holidays 2010 2: Clothes Maketh the Man

Why is it that whenever the sun peeps from behind the clouds for about ten seconds people start showing the weirdest looking body parts? The women look strange enough, with skirts too short too befit their age and fat bulging between those skirts and too tight t-shirts, but it’s the men that really make you wonder. Is there anything worse than a man in shorts? It doesn’t matter if the men are skinny or fat, shorts simply are the death of any relationship. It’s even worse when the man in question is wearing sandals and grey woolly socks as well or, God forbid, flipflops.


I’m in England, the country of Messrs Darcy and Rochester, the area where Heathcliffs can still roam the moors and where we can dream of Robin Hood and King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Have you ever wondered why women still secretly dream about men like that? It’s because they never wore shorts and sandals. Pre-1900 man really knew what women wanted and it was certainly not that. Ever wondered why men like wearing uniforms, especially the colourful ones they wore at battles like Waterloo? It was because a good uniform covers up all the flaws and makes even the scrawniest man with the wonkiest knees look to die for.

Now it would be going a bit far to start wishing men would start running around in uniforms like that again, but looking at themselves in a mirror before leaving the house in the morning would be rather considerate to their fellow human beings. Don’t these men have wives who tell them their sense of dress is totally off?

Although, come to think of it, their wives may be on to something, because, let’s be honest, if you had your own Mr Darcy at home, would you want other women to know about that? Wouldn’t you actually send him out in shorts and sandals yourself so no other woman would look at him twice?

I’m sitting in my car in a car park near the M4 motorway on my way to Wiltshire, sipping a cappuccino from a big cardboard mug looking at the men going by. I haven’t seen a Darcy or Rochester yet, but who knows, the holidays have only just begun ….

Summer Holidays 2010 1: Customs

Arriving in England on a brilliantly sunny summer morning is always a pleasure until you get stopped by a customs officer at the ferry port of Harwich and you start feeling like a criminal.

“What is the purpose of your visit, madam?”

The smile looks genuine but the feeling behind it is clear. You, madam, are a woman travelling on your own. You must be either very weird or a drugs trafficker. Now I know that I’m a bit odd, even one of my best friends told me so (and I must say I’m rather proud of that), but I’m certainly no drugs trafficker, so in a situation like this there are two things you can do.

1. I could behave indignantly, which will surely result in me having to unpack the whole car, but will give me the satisfaction of feeling very superior once I’m allowed to leave, or

2. smile sweetly and be very nice, treat the gentleman like he’s my favourite grandson and be very sympathetic he has a job like that.
I didn’t feel like going for option one. As I said, the sun was shining and the countryside had looked very appealing from the ferry when we were disembarking, so I went for the big smile.

“The purpose of my visit, sir, is a holiday. I will be visiting friends in Wiltshire and I got to know them when I rented a cottage from them a few years ago.”

My smile didn’t seem to make an immediate impression.

“So what is your profession, madam?”

“I’m an English teacher.”

I was relieved to see that that helped for some reason. It seems teachers are somehow trustworthy. Or maybe his wife was a teacher as well.

The questions went on for a while, but finally he told me I could go. I had no idea what I had said to make him change his mind but I was greatly relieved to find that I didn’t have to unpack the car after all and wouldn’t have to explain why I was carrying my medication in bulk. I’m a terrible worrier so I always take more medication than is needed in two separate bags. In case one of them gets stolen, I will still have the second bag. Then of course I also take into account the fact that there may be a delay in getting home, so I always take a bit extra. Anyway, in retrospect, I would have had a lot to explain.

Needless to say, I accelerated out of there. The last thing I saw of the friendly customs officer was his head disappearing in a cloud of diesel from my exhaust.

I love England. Though a part of Europe, people there have retained the sense of isolation true to island dwellers. They do everything their own way and even when you can travel anywhere in Europe nowadays without having to show your passport England is the perfect exception to the rule. It still takes a long way to go through customs, especially when you’re a single lady from Holland (the den of iniquity as far as drugs and sex are concerned), but still I wouldn’t want to miss my trips over there.

People often ask me why I like going to the UK when I could so easily go somewhere else where it’s just as beautiful and where I could go with a lot less hassle, but I truly wouldn’t know. I could of course give you a whole list of things which I’m sure you can find in any travel guide, but essentially it comes down to only one thing. For some reason arriving in England always feels like coming home. I’m just odd that way

Longleat (summer 2008)

I found this little blog in an old notebook and although it’s a few years old, it was always meant to be posted here but somehow forgotten. Still, the sentiments haven’t changed.

Why is it that every time I go out with my six-year-old cousin and her father or mother, depending on who stays home with the baby, it rains? I can’t say anything against my cousin. She’s really cute and always very good, apart from the occasional whine when she gets tired. No, it’s more other people’s children I’d gladly strangle after a day of tramping through the rain and wind and visiting Postman Pat’s village, a parrot show, a stately home and a safari park.

Morning coffee was relatively quiet. The restaurant in the cellar of the stately home was still nearly unoccupied. At the table next to us there were two young girls who were trying to demolish a few plastic flowers that had been put in a vase in the middle of the table. The flowers were not very nice so I wasn’t sorry for that, but then a baby in a high chair started screaming like a pig that was being slaughtered. Remember, we were in the cellars and apart from the modern tables and chairs it was still as it had been hundreds of years ago when the pile was built.

The sounds of the screaming reverberated through the vaulted space and echoed back from all sides. I felt like I had a year ago, BA (before antidepressants), when I couldn’t stand any sort of noise at all, let alone wailing like that. It was enough to make the rock hard scone I had ordered with my coffee get stuck in my throat. And that was only the beginning of the day.

I’ll skip the incident of being nearly bowled over by two teenagers running on their way to somewhere really important and the family of six sitting behind us at the parrot show in Pet’s Corner eating jam sandwiches and attracting at least half the wasp population of Wiltshire. Nor will I speak of the parents who had probably learned from some tabloid how to discuss everything with their little darlings. No, I’m sure you’re getting the picture.

At the end of the afternoon we passed through the part of the safari park where the rhesus monkeys are kept. There was a sign at the entrance warning us in big blood-red lettering that the monkeys actually like damaging cars and that you are going in at your own risk. In retrospect, not a bad sign to put at the gate of my school.

Once inside the enclosure you can see that the sign is not an exaggeration. Monkeys are everywhere. They climb on the cars, jump from one car to another, break off windscreen wipers and rear view mirrors and to top it all off, I saw one swinging from an antenna while another one was tearing rubber insulation strips from car doors. And the parents were giving the youngsters the “good” example. They reminded me of the two fat women with tattoos who were screaming at their combined brats about the food in the tuck shop earlier. It’s a good thing my car is made of decent German stuff. The monkeys didn’t even give it a second glance. They sure know their car makes.

But I won’t say it. I’m not like my grandma yet, who said things like “In my days everything was different” and “children should be seen but not heard”. In those days, when a child asked “Why?” it was just told “Because!”. I won’t say that. Never! But oh, how I want to!

Is It a Present?

Why is it that whenever I go into a bookshop the lady at the till always asks me if the book I’m buying is a present? Do I look as if I never read a book? As if I have friends who always read books but I don’t? Do people who buy books always get them for other people?

For heaven’s sake! I’m in a bookshop! I want to browse and then I want to buy a book just for me! It’s not a gift shop. If I want people to gift-wrap a book for me, I’ll ask for it!

If I were to run a bookshop I would probably never earn enough money to keep it going. I would adjust the lighting (don’t you just absolutely hate those fluorescent tubes which illuminate even the farthest corners and make everyone look as if they just left hospital and are still trying to recuperate from some wasting disease?) and create nice corners with comfy chairs and little reading lamps so that everyone could browse at leisure. I would even make a little nook where you could get a cup of tea or coffee. People who love to read would probably stay there for hours and I wouldn’t earn a penny.

Something I also hate is when you enter a bookshop and someone comes up to you and asks you if they can help you. NO, I don’t need help! I just want to browse! Go away! In every shop it’s great when you finally find someone who wants to help you, especially when you get stuck in the dress you were trying out for instance, but NOT in a bookstore! There you need to browse. Those are the shops I never visit twice.

Have people become mad? Don’t they know anymore what books are for? They are for reading! For yourself, not to give away as presents. How can I know what someone else wants to read? When I want someone to have a book I give him a book token so he can go to a shop himself and browse. That’s the whole fun of getting a new book.

Even worse are the libraries nowadays. I usually buy my books because when I like them I don’t want to take them back. I want to keep them even when I know I won’t ever read them again, but there is another reason. Libraries used to be quiet places, havens of rest in the middle of a crowded city and it used to be an offence if you made a noise there.

Oh, how things have changed. Now they have a special children’s corner where there are all kinds of toys. Children are dumped there when the mummies go off to do something else, probably text message their friends in other libraries or have decadent cocktails à la Sex in the City somewhere.

Toys! I ask you! A library is meant for reading and books and getting information and if you are too small for that, you don’t belong there. Or if you are there anyway, you should be seen and not heard (to be really old-fashioned (oh dear, did I really say that now?)).

The last time I visited a library it was as if I had entered a play school. Yelling children everywhere and nobody to tell them to shut up. Needless to say, I left. Fast. Never to return.
I’m thankful there are places online where I can get my books nowadays. At least I can browse there in my own armchair without screaming children or nagging salespersons.

I’m seriously considering emigrating to a country where they still know how to run a bookshop or a library. If you know of one, please, let me know. Rant over. I’m off to read a good book ….