Boardom

Not a word since November 10.
What can I say? Life's been uneventful. I've been playing too much hockey. I just didn't have the inspiration.
As usual, it has taken a trip away from the vibrant metropolis that is Voorburg to get the blog creativity juices flowing again. That and an encounter with a wild boar.
We're in France with my mum for Christmas. My brother's arriving tomorrow with his family, the other brother is possibly tooling down from his snowbound home in the Alps for Christmas dinner.
The Ardeche, where mum lives, is beautiful in the summer but even prettier in the winter - there are no Dutch tourists moaning about the absence of their favorite brand of peanut butter from the supermarket shelves or lying butt naked on the banks of the local rivers frying themselves to a mahogany crisp. The rivers are real flowing rivers rather than strings of rapidly stagnating pools and the weather is beautiful. Today was crystal clear and cold with a stiff wind.
As we drove over the hills towards the valley where mum lives, I saw this panorama on one side. With the children keen to get to grandma's and the midday sun lighting the scene a little too harshly for my taste I decided against stopping.
But once the sun started setting, I headed back up the hill on my own and stood for 40 minutes by the side of a road - the only vantage point available amid the steep hills and dense undergrowth - snapping away hopefully on the off chance I'd manage to get a decent picture.
What I forgot in my haste to get up the hill before the sun disappeared below the horizon was that mum's part of the world is home to a large number of wild boars.
Serious animals. Big, bristling bags of muscle and tusk that are cranky at the best of times. But these are not the best times. This is hunting season, when every French man and his dog is out 12-gauge shot gun over his shoulder trying to bag himself the essential ingredient of a sanglier stew. These boars aren't wild, they are (with thanks to Not the Nine O'Clock News) livid.
None of this crossed my mind until I heard the unmistakable sound of a large pig trotting at pace through the bushes on the other side of the two-lane road to where I was standing behind my tripod.
I turned to face the noise about five meters away and while I couldn't see the bastard I swear I could almost smell its breath and feel its eyes boring into me (and I'll try really hard to make that the last boar/bore gag) with a potent mix of fear and loathing.
As I looked around, wondering what to do next, I saw that I was standing right in front of a small path leading off the asphalt and into the bushes on the opposite side of the road to where the boar, which was now _ I could hear this _ pacing up and down impatiently in the undergrowth. I was obviously blocking a well-trodden pig pathway. My side of the road was a good three meters above the bush, meaning that the path was the only way down for any self-respecting pig. A cursory glance down the path revealed not one but several tennis ball-sized pig turds.
It was decision time. The sun was about 10 minutes from setting and I'd already been hanging around in the cold for 30 minutes waiting for the afterglow to light up the hills. But was it worth risking the wrath of a pig that may or may not just have lost its life partner and three little piggie offspring to a hunter's shot?
I decided it was, particularly as it offered the chance of a pic of a crazed boar bearing down on me. I got my other camera - one with film in it - ready. It has a nice wide angle lens that I reckoned would probably get a piece of the pig even if I was shooting over my shoulder while running away at full speed (which, it occurs to me now over a glass of white Burgundy in mum's kitchen, is nowhere near the speed of a boar going at full bore - oops. sorry).
I'd love to be able to say I nailed the pig just as I sidestepped its charge and am waiting for the film to be developed to post it on the blog. But sadly it refused to show its snout even as I wandered back to the car after realizing that the sunset shot was a waste of my time because all the hills in the foreground just disappeared into shadows once the sun went down.
When I told an even more exaggerated version of this story to mum she just shrugged her shoulders and said she saw a big pig wander through her back garden on the way to the neighboring vineyard just the other day. So tomorrow night I plan to sit in the warm kitchen with another white wine and camera at the ready and shoot the boar as it strolls by.

Zutphen pix

Zutphen

It's been a while. I have no real excuses. 

Back to work after holidays. Back to the daily routine/grind. There just didn't seem much to write about.

On the upside, I now hold the record of 3-under-par on the girls' Wii golf game - and I can still use an apostrophe.

We just got back from an incredibly pleasant weekend away in the beautiful little town of Zutphen. We'd visited pretty towns beginning with every other letter of the alphabet, so it seemed like time.

Plus, it was our wedding anniversary today. 

We received a handful of cards/emails from friends and family not one of which correctly guessed which anniversary it was - my mum was close with 11, as was our friend Wietske (who organized our wedding) who inacurately hedged her bets on 11 or 10 years. Irmie's uncle picks up the booby prize for furthest from the pin after weighing in with eight years. Irmie, scandalized, said: But Esther and Julia were born more than eight years ago. She's a Catholic.

When we got back today, Irmie's parents came through with a bunch of flowers and a card correctly congratulating us on our 12th anniversary - although it looked a bit like the 2 in 12 might have started life as a 1.

To celebrate a dozen years of wedlock and the fact that we're too poor to actually suffer very greatly from the credit crisis, we - and by we I mean Irmie - went shopping yesterday. 

Actually, we were not wholly untouched.

Last week, the Icelandic bank that was holding our life savings went belly up and took our hard earned cash with it. Irmie, whose idea it was to deposit our wealth there because I'm too lazy to research things like what accounts give you the most interest, was a little upset to learn it had all gone down the toilet. So she was very happy indeed when the Dutch government took the politically inevitable decision to guarantee all deposits up to 100,000 euros. An amount that dwarfed our little chunk of readies.

Even so, we felt wealthy again.

The nice thing was that all the shops in Zutphen are in its beautiful town center which somehow both the Nazis and Allies managed to avoid bombing back to the stone age during the last days of World War II.

The town is on the banks of the river Ijssel and was once a thriving and prosperous inland port. As a result, it has little harbours, a spectacular church and hundreds of beautifully preserved old mansions and converted warehouses. 

One of the nicest things about the whole weekend was that we left the girls with Oma and Opa. Yes, children enrich our lives in so many ways. Yes, we love them to bits. Yes, they're gorgeous. But come on parents, let's be honest, what is better than springing for a weekend off from the offspring?

We were able to wander about the town, looking at historic little courtyards and the remnants of ancient defensive walls and watch the sun go down over the Ijssel all without having to endure a single request for an ice cream, without hearing how boring ancient defensive walls and courtyards are and without hearing a word said about how sore anybody's legs/feet/arms were.

More importantly, we were able to go for a 50-kilometer bike ride this morning without any whinging requests to be pushed/turn around/stop for an ice cream.

Before the ride, we also got to lie in until - jikes! - 8:30 a.m. And when we went for breakfast at our B&B nobody complained about the fact that our hostess considered organic cheese laced with stinging nettles an acceptable foodstuff for first thing in the morning.

The bike ride was nice. We saw a whole bunch of storks. 

Hang on, better look up that collective noun. 

Wikipedia suggests both a phalanx and a muster (apparently a phalanx is when they're airborne so we saw a muster because they were all kind of standing around in a field).

I guess there must be more storks in New Zealand because they have far more CNs ranging from the unimaginative flight and flock to the more colorful cluster and clatter and then the plain odd filth of storks.

The nicest thing about the ride was spending four hours in the saddle and never tiring of things to talk about - which is pretty cool after eight years of marriage, let alone a dozen.

 

Austria

Odd country, Austria. I’ve tried in vain to find a piece of litter on the streets of Leogang, the sleepy skiing village I’m based in while covering Russia at Euro 2008. Yet the same meticulous nation that won’t drop a lolly wrapper on the road also produces people who lock up and molest girls/daughters for decades. If there’s a link between these two phenomena, I can’t see it.What I also can’t see at the moments are the Austrian Alps. I’m slap bang in the middle of them, but all I’ve had for my first two days here are brief glimpses of craggy peaks between rain clouds that have descended on pretty much the whole Euro 2008 tournament. A friend of mine is in Lausanne and he has the same weather.
What I also haven’t seen much of is the Russian team. A little bit disappointing as I’m trying hard to interview them and generally get to know them before their first match next Tuesday against notorious big tournament chokers Spain. Russia’s Dutch coach Guus Hiddink has already cancelled two morning training sessions and last night only answered one question before getting onto the team bus.

I have however seen lots of Russian journalists and discovered why their country is going through such an economic boom – to a man (and the Russian press pack is, to a man, a man) they smoke like chimneys and appear to drink only Red Bull. These people must never sleep. Having said that, many of them still manage to exude an air of Communist-era lethargy.
I’m staying at a, how can I put this? Quaint skiing chalet-style hotel. A few things it doesn’t have: WIFI access; credit card-style door keys (my back hurts from carrying my key and its baroque, heavy metal key ring up and down the two flights of stairs to my room); little bars of soap and bottles of shampoo. This is a disappointment to me, who didn’t pack any grooming products beyond a toothbrush. Instead, my shower has one of those dispensers of two-in-one body/hair wash stuck to the wall. The hotel also appears to have no guests apart from me and Sergey, the AP photographer I’m working with here.
What it does have is Alpine charm. The hostess, Frauleun Frick, is incredibly friendly and helpful. She boils a mean egg and speaks good English, which is more than most Austrians appear to be able to do. I note that I can’t speak German, so I can’t really be upset with them for that.
Its also got a bunny rabbit made of straw and sporting a bow tie on the stairs, a HUGE jigsaw of a generic Alpine scene that has been glued together, framed and hung on a wall, and a cheese plant that looks, from the size of the thing, to be a remnant of the 1970s. At breakfast this morning, it had a selection of four different fruit juices and no glasses to pour them into.
It also has that same almost sinister Austrian efficiency that I assume keeps the streets polished. Every day as I eat breakfast, somebody cleans my room to within an inch of its life. How this mystery cleanliness operative knows I’m gone and slips in and out of my room in my brief absence is a mystery to me. (apologies if this sounds like a far less funny version of David Foster Wallace’s account of his cabin cleaner on a luxury cruise liner – I swear I only now noticed the similarity. Anybody who hasn’t read DFW’s essay about life on a cruise liner – A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again - I strongly suggest you do so at your earliest convenience).
This village has just one restaurant, which is a disappointment in more ways than one. Lovely patron, but an incredibly dubious menu, that mixes Austrian staples of bacon and more bacon with Italian and Mexican influences. Given that the menu is available in either German or Russian, it makes every meal a little adventure. Tonight, he was serving beer to a couple of 13-year-old boys who were propping up the bar. He seemed happy to do this just so long as he splashed a little Coca Cola in their half-litre glasses of lager.
Odd country.

Three girls and a bike

Just to practice posting photos to the blog via our new computer, here's an idyllic little scene of the girls arriving home from the market on Saturday.

Julia's getting a little big for her tiny saddle behind the handlebars so this probably won't happen too many more times.

If you look carefully in the background, you can see the fourth girl I share the house with peering out of the window.

Lice to be back

It's been a while since my last blog. There's a simple reason: head lice.

Early evenings in the Corder house these days resemble a David Attenbrough documentary about western lowland gorillas. I sit combing and picking at, Julia's hair while Irmie does the same for Esther. The only difference between us and apes is that we don't eat the bugs when we find them - although it has been seriously that I ought to bite the lice eggs (I believe these are called nits, if you're interested) to kill them.

Late last year I was appointed a lice father at Esther and Julia's school. It was a rare honor and recognition of my years of careful preening regimen. What it means is that I go once a month and do the gorilla head picking thing in Julia's class while the teacher and kids go about their work as if there's nothing going on.

My one reservation at taking the job was that I'd never actually seen a lice or one of its eggs and wasn't sure I'd be able to recognize one even if it jumped off a head and bit me.

Now I can only look back wistfully at those days of innocence. 

The most unpleasant fact of this story is that the first I knew of our little infestation issue was when I casually scratched MY head and discovered a little bug dusting itself off as it clambered out form under my fingernail. I briefly tried to talk myself into believing that this was some sort of mutant dandruff. But of course then you start looking back at the fact that Esther and Julia had been scratching their scalps a lot over the previous few weeks and it all falls into place.

I wanted to immediately douse everybody in the house in agent orange, but instead Irmie went to the chemist and came back with some kind of natural remedy shampoo  and a couple of fine-tooth combs.

We tried this and of course the lice just put on their shower caps and came out gleaming like new but not in the least dead. Fortunately, there were once lice in Esther's class in Beecroft and we had protectively nuked her with a savage shampoo bought over the counter of a Sydney chemist. 

This stuff clearly meant business. While the Dutch lotion had pictures of smiling children on the bottle, its Australian big brother was covered in warnings about not drinking it, getting it in the eyes or allowing it to drip onto the enamel of your bathtub for more than five seconds. It wasn't actually napalm, but I don't think it was a very distant relative. 

Anyway it appeared to get the job done. I have had no recurrence of my infestation and Irmie and Esther also appear to be bug free. But as I was cleaning Julia's teeth a few nights ago she peered into the mirror, said "Look," and picked one out of her hair. 

The problem, you see, is the eggs (nits). I must have picked out about 100 of the tiny rugby ball shaped things, but they cling to the hair and only one needs to survive the Australian poison rinse for a new cycle of critters to be unleashed.

As I write, we appear to be free and can erase the black cross daubed on our front door. But it only takes one nit..

Anybody's scalp itching?