Two redheads in a bike

He has, of course, been there many times before. Daily as a baby to drop off and pick up his big sister, and here and there during the last school year when Eloïse went back op visite. On recent visits it’s been hard to get him out of there at 2:00 when all the parents leave.

Ian and I both stayed for the whole first day to watch the proceedings. Eloïse got to play at two of her friends’ houses while we were there. He was a bit shy to start, but not terribly so. But after his second day he still hasn’t spent more than a few minutes in the large sandbox, which was his sister’s favorite place to hang out. I was sure that he was going to go straight for the water table that comes out once the parents leave, but while he has looked at it with great interest he has yet to spend more than a couple of minutes at it. One problem is that he’s been wearing sandals and he really doesn’t like to get sand in his shoes. There’s a rule that shoes have to stay on at school so we’ve got to remember to put him in closed shoes tomorrow to see if that remedies the problem.

Right when he was starting to talk, it was very very cold here and there was ice everywhere. We were frequently warning him about not slipping on it. Then we went to Egypt were I guess we were warning him about slipping on the sand (on dunes, for example). He took to calling sand “ice” from that point on. So now he says that he has ice in his shoes. Sometimes he gets it right, but more often than not sand is ice.

Instead of the sand and water table that Eloïse gravitated towards, Lucas has taken an interest in the cars, trucks and airplanes. Here’s a movie: Lukie plays with a truck. Lest you think he’s a real man’s man, note his dress-up clothing selection in subsequent photos. He’s taken a sudden strong interest in “blue-tiful” dresses and skirts. As I type now he lies asleep in bed with one of his sister’s outgrown pink skirts on. Boys will be boys.

I think the reading of the book was perhaps a highlight of the first day for Lucas and today he was quick to invite himself back up to the couch area where Wanda sits to read the book. On a normal day being chosen to sit next to Wanda for the book is a big honor that the children must be chosen for; I guess she’s just made an exception for him these last days since he’s just beginning. This particular book involves a lot of yelling of “STOP!” and “TOOT-TOOT!” and he parroted that every time Wanda read those lines.

Lukie, Isha and Sophia sit with Wanda as she reads the book of the day

At the end of the school day yesterday the bikes and scooters were out and Lukie tried a tricycle. To my great surprise, he was able to pedal it! It only took him a few minutes to get good enough to actually go around the room unassisted. Here’s a movie: Lukie’s first day on a tricycle. I remember that it was well into Eloïse’s time at peuterspeelzaal that she acquired this skill.

Today I left for an hour, ostensibly to buy popsicles as a treat for him being so brave to stay on his own. He wasn’t at all keen on the idea of me going and tried to come with me, but when he realized that he could wave bye-bye to me, something that he has been talking about frequently, he came around to the idea. I’m told that he never cried and had a great time while I was gone. When I got back, I came upon the group just getting ready to paint. He saw me after a couple of minutes and immediately burst into tears. Clearly the stress of being left on his own for the first time with people that he doesn’t know well took all that he had. He’s hardly been left at all with people that he does know well, after all.

After a good cry and few minutes of snuggles he was ready to join back in with the painting and the rest of the activities of the day.

Ethan, Amelie, Lukie and Boyd get artistic

Tomorrow Ian will take him to school, as I have an appointment. I suspect that Ian’s departure will be easier for him. We’ll see if I’m right. Hopefully he won’t melt into a big ball of wailing baby as soon as I pick him up. Even if he does, I feel very confident that within a few days he will be an old pro; he does, after all, have the best peuterjuf in the Netherlands!

The weather couldn’t have been better. Utrecht was basking in gorgeous sunshine when my friend and I arrived. It was a perfect summer’s day.

After a prearranged dinner with kindred spirits from Brendan’s on-line forum, we all headed over to the Domkerk to await the opening of the church doors.

The Domkerk is a truly beautiful building, still very much in active use as a place of worship. Its atmopsheric interior formed the perfect setting for Brendan’s pensive music.

Tonight saw a different kind of flock gather in the pews, however. Brendan was headlining the first day of the Summer Darkness festival, something the organisers had wanted to have him do since the festival’s inception.

With a capacity of 650 people, the venue was sold out. It was nice to see so many people turn out to see Brendan, and a far cry from some of the 100 person gigs earlier in the year.

The crowd were a sea of black; hardly surprising, given the nature of the festival. Some people must have spent the entire day in front of the mirror, preparing to be seen at their most vivid.

With this audience as resplendent as the church in which they had congregated, the scene was set. There was a sense of great expectation in the air, the atmosphere electric and laden with childlike excitement. This gathering were surely no less faithful than the flock that assemble here on a Sunday morning. We, too, were here to be edified, fulfilled and give praise.

Initially, we had all politely filed along the pews, but once we were neatly seated, one of the organisers announced that we were free to desert the pews and stand in front of the stage. Well, he didn’t need to repeat himself. We quickly scuttled to the front and I took up position just a couple of metres back from the front of the stage.

The pews would have been less than ideal, because they were situated at 90 degrees to the stage, so a crick in one’s neck would have been the likely result of spending the entire evening with one’s head craned to the far left.

My new position also concerned me, however, because it placed me at some distance from the PA, which was way off to the side, next to the pews.

Unfortunately, there was no way to position myself in front of the PA without being so close as to risk worse sound than I was likely to get from this new position, not to mention that that vantage point would have been significantly worse for viewing the gig, which, let’s face it, is what it’s actually all about.

So, with the PA behind me and off to the side, I decided to simply hope for the best, sound-wise.

After a short introduction by the festival organiser, Brendan took to the stage. The first detail of note was that Rachel Haden had been replaced on bass by Rory O’Brien.

The sound was crisp and clear throughout the frequency range, even from my vantage point. The people still seated in the pews, however, were initially shocked and awed by the high volume. As the drum intro to The Arcane kicked in, people could be seen clutching at their ears. When this was observed by the sound engineer, he mercifully adjusted the volume for them.

Since the last time I had seen Brendan, Tim Buckley’s Song To The Siren had been added to the set. Gone were You Never Loved This City and Voyage Of Bran.

Song To The Siren was a particularly mesmerising rendition and I could quite happily have listened to it continue for another five minutes.

You could have heard a pin drop after the applause following each song died down. Every bleep from a mobile phone and every click of a camera’s shutter swelled to an obtrusive level. The audience were remarkably reverential and appreciative, united in their appreciation of this man’s music.

As usual, it seemed to end upon beginning, but an immense, palpable sense of satisfaction pervaded the air afterwards. Brendan had quite literally thrilled us all.

This was, perhaps, the best of the seven gigs I’ve seen him play this year. The combination of venue and audience anticipation was unparalleled, I think, and the fact we were allowed to stand created a much greater sense of intimacy than had been present at, for example, the Union Chapel, which is otherwise also an atmospheric venue.

There are some excellent photos of the gig on the Summer Darkness site.

My recording of the gig is up on DIME.

Ian didn’t buy it for her because it’s a horrible bit of junky tat and didn’t let her buy it for herself because he didn’t know what her current pocket money situation was. Luckily for her, she hadn’t yet spent last week’s pound so the next day it became her third pocket money purchase.

The day has, of course, been marked by errands and chores: a haircut for Luke and me, a run to the post-office to pick up packages that couldn’t be delivered in our absence, fetching new coffee beans, sorting through the mountain of post that all but stopped us gaining entry to the house, and an evening ride to the supermarket to stock up on food provisions. It’s good to be back on the bike.

Speaking of Lukie’s haircut, he looks so different now. It’s aged him a bit, but in a nice way. He looks gorgeous.

Tomorrow morning, we have to clean and prepare for a friend of mine who will be staying for a couple of days.

For those who are interested, here’s the map of our full route from Amsterdam to Scotland and back.

The map only shows the places where we spent the night, plus a couple of the ferry ports (necessary to make the map plot the correct route). All in all, we notched up a healthy 3455 km. With two children and the Scottish weather, our car is a lot filthier on the inside than the outside and could do with a good clean.

It’s always good to be back. It didn’t used to be, but since we’ve had this house and made it feel like a home, rather than just a place to crash, it’s always felt good to come back to it (and made it hard to even go away sometimes, too).

As ever, I’m looking forward to my own bed tonight.

We managed the whole 460+ km without a single puking incident from Lucas. If I tell you that we’ve had days on this trip that he puked in the first 8 km, you have some idea of how windy the roads are on the Scottish islands.

For me, it was a nice drive with plenty of variation: some two-way road, some dual-carriageway and an all too brief stretch of motorway. The two-way stretch yielded the usual frustration of slow drivers who refuse to pull over, but we made good time, were able to stop and eat lunch and still arrive just 35 minutes after check-in for our ferry had commenced.

After a short wait, we drove on board, parked and made our way to our cabin for the night. And what a welcome sight it was.

After dumping our stuff, it was straight down to the play area to reward the little blighters for having been so patient in the car. Neither of them slept at all during the journey, which was very surprising.

Ship time is CEST, not BST, and there was a kids’ event scheduled for 19:00, so we made a restaurant reservation and ate dinner at 18:00, which our stomachs thought was only 17:00, so we weren’t particularly hungry.

Eloïse went to play in the kids’ group at 19:00, followed by Lucas as soon as we had finished eating. Eloïse happily joined in with the treasure hunt, going up and down the length of the boat with the girl running the event and the other kids, apparently not giving a moment’s thought to where her parents might be. That girl’s come a long way in coming out of her shell.

After some colouring and being given some sculpted balloons, it was bed time.

I left Sarah in a darkened cabin to put Lucas to sleep and went downstairs to enjoy the corny cabaret entertainment. You have to admire people who have chosen a career in show business and are currently on the rung of the ladder that is show girl or musical performer on the Newcastle to IJmuiden ferry.

If I sound denigrating, it’s unintentional. I really have the utmost respect for people who don’t consider a gig like that beneath them. Everyone has to start somewhere and one of these people might make it big one day — no, really! — but here they are, giving it their all for a captive ferry boat audience. Respect!

After taking part in the pop quiz, which I did pretty well on, but didn’t win, I gave up on the nightlife and went back to the cabin, where I’m typing this for upload in the morning.

I’m knackered. Time to sleep.

I’m filled with the same paradoxical sensation that I always have at the end of one of our holidays, particularly the summer ones. On the one hand, it seems quite recent that we set off from Amsterdam for a month in the Scottish highlands and islands. On the other hand, Edinburgh, our first destination, feels as if it was months ago. The dismal defeat of the Dutch at the hands — or rather the feet — of the Spanish, which we watched with a friend in the restaurant of our Edinburgh hotel, is now but a dimly painful memory. It really does feel like three months ago, not one.

Tomorrow’s a long drive, from Inverness to North Shields. It will clock in at about twice the distance of our longest day of driving so far.

We’ve been quite good at keeping the number of kilometres driven on any one day reasonably low, with only three days peaking above 200 km, but this has also been dictated by the geography of the region and the nature of the roads. The distances I’ve been noting in my phone also exclude any travel by ferry.

This has been one of the best trips we’ve ever done and I’m certain it won’t be our last to Scotland. Indeed, we’re already talking about coming back for more next year.

By and large, we’ve been quite lucky with the weather. Rain was forecast for virtually every day of the trip and, whilst we had only a handful of gloriously sunny, dry days, we also had mercifully few that it rained for the entire day. Even when this was the case, we were not confined to our hotel, so the misery we suffered during our May trip to Italy wasn’t even vaguely hinted at during our travels around Scotland.

The whole family have enjoyed this trip to the hilt. No-one wants to go home. Eloïse said today that she would like to remain on holiday for as long as possible. I’m the downer here, forcing us to go back for yet another Brendan Perry gig.

Still, a month on the road is nothing to complain about, is it? It’s a good length of time. Whilst I’ve loved every minute, I’ve also adjusted to the idea of going home and am now even looking forward to it. It’s not often that we get to spend twelve days of summer in Amsterdam, as we often leave the day after school breaks up and return the day before the new term begins. It will be a novelty to be in the house without needing to set the alarm clock on the Sonos.

Our last day in Inverness was a lazy, but oddly tiring day.

We started after breakfast with a walk along the east bank of the Ness to the Ness Islands. We then looped and returned along the west bank, watching anglers at work in the water. The entire circuit was completed under a blue sky. The sun shone brightly and it was an unusually warm day, perhaps the warmest of the whole trip. I even had to remove my jacket. It may have been the first > 20°C day that we’ve had. I’m not complaining, though. We like it that way.

The afternoon was spent browsing through the streets of Inverness, doing some final shopping. The pound is still fucked, so everything is cheap. I bought a pair of sandals, a Snow White dress for Eloïse — she’s ecstatic about it — and a warm autumn coat for the wee man.

We have a very early alarm set for tomorrow and six hours of driving ahead of us before we get to the ferry. I’ll be very glad to get to our cabin and throw myself down on my bunk. We’ll be back home in Amsterdam Thursday morning.

These headhunters obviously don’t do much research on the candidates they are attempting to recruit. If they did, they’d quickly discover that I am and have always been a vociferous critic of a service — I use the term loosely — that I believe is a blight on the on-line world.

Perhaps they believe I might be mercenary enough to work for them anyway, despite a total lack of affinity for the company or its product. If so, they are wrong. I wish Facebook absolutely nothing good.

Facebook is busy creating an alternate on-line ecosystem that will, if the trend continues, disenfranchise all who do not use it. The day is not too far removed when Facebook usurps e-mail as the primary means of communication. In some circles, this has already happened.

Already, so much material is lost to one unless one surrenders to the Facebook hegemony and signs up for an account. What should be — and, until just a few years ago, did still take the form of — unencumbered, accessible material is now sequestrated behind closed doors, assimilated and absorbed by a corporate entity that is gnawing away at the notion of publicly accessible information with the naïve cooperation of millions of collaborators, more commonly known as its users, from whom it draws its power.

It’s an unwelcome return to the bad old days, when the concept of multiple parallel, mutually inaccessible content provider networks was still the norm. The Internet ultimately won from closed systems like Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL by being based on open standards. These standards meant that no company could misappropriate the Internet’s protocols, control its growth or lay claim to its content. This made the Internet free — free as in gratis and free as in liberty — and this freedom was to become the ice-age for closed system dinosaurs like Compuserve.

Facebook is different, however. Whereas networks like Compuserve were distinct and separate alternatives to the Internet, neighbours to it, if you will, Facebook is burrowed deep inside it, feeding on it like a parasite.

What once might have surfaced as a blog or a user’s personal home page is now more likely to find a vent on Facebook, where it automatically becomes the intellectual property of the host company, generally inaccessible to anyone unwilling to join as a member. And there are many reasons why one might desire not to become a member of Facebook. There’s much wrong with both the company and its product, from multiple societal, sociological, technical and ethical standpoints.

For me, the biggest of many issues is the undermining of the social fabric of the Internet itself. Facebook partially solves the very real problem of managing on-line relationships, but does so by hermetically drawing the user inside its biosphere. Rather than expand the on-line universe, Facebook causes it to contract. The goal is not so much to aid human-beings in their pursuit of managing relationships, as it is to control the entire infrastructure for doing so.

Facebook therefore operates parasitically within the Web, like a huge tick in its flesh, steadily weakening its host. I want no part of that. It’s enough of a thorn in my side that Sarah sees fit to use it. She regards Facebook much more superficially and benignly than I do and, as a result, I can’t read what my own wife posts there or look at the photos she uploads. Other people in a similar predicament sign up for an account at this point, but I am of the opinion that I’d then be complicit in an endeavour that I believe to be fundamentally rotten and detrimental to the Internet

No amount of pre-IPO stock options is going to make me feel good about that, so thanks for this latest job offer, but no thanks.

If I make it sound as if we were dreading it, that’s deliberately misleading. Actually, Loch Ness is very beautiful, and indulging in a cruise of the loch is as good a way to kill an hour or two as any, particularly if the weather plays along.

If you can ignore the hordes of oddly-shaped people piling out of the buses, some of whom perhaps really do hope to catch a glimpse of the elusive Nessie, and the naffer-than-naff tourist tat shops — Nessie fridge magnets, bagpipe CDs and a tartan execution of just about any garment you care to mention — you can enjoy your time at the loch.

We drove a loop of the loch in anticlockwise direction, since that supposedly results in the best views. It was also the only way we could get to the departure point for our cruise on time.

Just outside of Drumnadrochit, we pulled off for our cruise of the loch, which lasted an hour and passed by Urquhart Castle. We had a few drops of rain on the return leg, but nothing bad. We even had sun for some of the cruise.

After lunch, we continued by car. The journey is nicely broken up by Fort Augustus at the south end of the loch, a pretty little town that is a big hit with the tourists, and a good place for a waterside drink. Unfortunately for Sarah, both children were sleeping when we arrived — one of whom on her lap — so she had to remain in the car while I ambled around for twenty minutes or so.

Fort Augustus has a fascinating series of locks that allow the Caledonian Canal, which runs from Fort William to Inverness, to step down to Loch Ness. If you don’t know your locks from your lochs, this is a good place to learn. I watched with interest as a yacht and several smaller boats were floated upwards from one of the lochs to the next. Very impressive, like watching a boat climb a flight of stairs.

Back at the car, an understandably envious Sarah listened as I explained the working of the lock that I had just witnessed. Lucas was still asleep, and that slumber is valuable driving time, so we headed back towards Inverness along the very scenic and equally windy B852. Luke would almost certainly have vomited if he’d been awake for that.

I haven’t given many food plugs on this trip, but one is certainly due for The Kitchen in Inverness. Both the food and the service were excellent, but if you’re going to go, be sure to book ahead. We were turned away yesterday evening.

The double T is not a misspelling, but refers to a village on Orkney. How can you not love a place that laughs in the face of the world’s sniggering.

We left Orkney via St. Margaret’s Hope and travelled by nippy catamaran ferry to the non-existent hamlet of Gills Bay, which is nothing more than a dock, on the Scottish mainland.

There began the drive along the eastern coast of Scotland, with a stop-off at John O’Groats to take a photo of the sign — well, you’ve got to, haven’t you? — and get a bite of lunch.

The drive down to Inverness was nice and relaxing, save for the few times I got stuck behind a Sunday driver and had to gnash my teeth while I waited for a safe stretch of road on which to overtake. It wasn’t until about 10 km outside of Inverness that I was treated to my first stretch of dual-carriageway since Glasgow.

Inverness feels huge after the last few weeks of island-hopping. With more than 50,000 inhabitants, it’s more than ten times the size of any town we’ve been to in recent times. It therefore feels big; very big; too big.

In Orkney, for example, a hot topic is that the supermarket chains are moving in, which spells problems for the small grocer, butcher, etc. People will vote with their wallet and the small, local shop will suffer and eventually disappear.

Even when I was growing up in what I was certain was the anus of the universe, Cornwall, that boat had sailed; or was, at least, faring out of port.

The wheels of time turn slowly on the western and northern isles of Scotland. The tale of the death of the grocer is being told only now. Unfortunately, we all know how the story ends. Although it’s only a matter of time, there’s some comfort to be had from the thought that the rot is not as advanced in some quarters. If you were on a sinking ship, you’d climb higher and higher in an effort to postpone the inevitable, no?

Orkney has no McDonalds, no Burger King, no KFC, no Starbucks and no Costa. There’s a Boots in Kirkwall, but that’s about it. There isn’t even an M & S. And yet, nothing is missing. Kirkwall is a lovely little town, with its beating heart still intact. Long may it remain that way. Fuck the trend of globalisation that is bringing about the reduction of the high streets of every European city to homogenised pulp.

Not that Inverness is without its own charm. The pedestrianised city centre is on the verge of surrendering its individuality, but the state of decay is such that, with a little imagination, one can still imagine how things might have looked before the mobile phone shops and other chain store decay took hold.

Further down, a walk along the banks of the Ness, the river that flows to the famous loch of the same name, is still a fine pursuit.

We’ll spend three nights in Inverness before embarking on the very long drive south to catch the ferry home from Newcastle or thereabouts.

After a brief walk into Kirkwall to purchase wool for Sarah to knit with, we drove out to Mull Head and spent 2½ hours hiking around the cliffs.

Eloïse didn’t complain once during the 5.6 km hike, which was very impressive. Some of it was over rough terrain and the wind was blasting in from the sea, but she didn’t once whinge about it. Lucas was asleep in the sling the whole time.

There were no lunch options in the area, so we drove down to St. Margaret’s Hope again and had lunch at the same place as yesterday.

As a treat for the children and because it was now quite late in the day, we decided to go to the Marine Life Aquarium, which showcases the sea life found in the coastal waters around Orkney. It was rather expensive for what it was, with only a couple of rows of tanks, but the place is clearly run with a lot of love by the couple who own it and probably only just breaks even.

There’s information everywhere and bizarre ornaments adorn the walls and ceiling wherever you cast your gaze. On the tank that should contain, amongst other things, a spider crab, the proprietor has written on the tank’s label that the “brown crab ate the spider crab”. It’s amateurism in a good way, the kind that warms the cockles of your heart.

Our final stop of the day was the Italian Chapel on the tiny island of Lamb Holm, which is a chapel built during the second world war by Italian prisoners of war, who wanted a place to worship. It’s a very impressive piece of work. Such was the devotion that went into creating the chapel that, when the war ended and the inmates were free to be repatriated, one of them chose to stay to finish work on the chapel. It ranks amongst the more interesting places of worship that I have visited. You can almost feel the presence of the POWs who built it.

Tomorrow, we catch the ferry from St. Margaret’s Hope to Gills Bay on the mainland and then drive south to Inverness.