Het geeft me veel plezier

It must be about 40 years ago that my love affair began.  Rest assured, my wife knew all about it; I made no secret of the fact that visiting the Netherlands gave me great pleasure.  When it all began I was the local Big Cheese in the Scouts.  One of the leaders in our district had formed a friendship with a scout leader in the Hague (or den Haag as the Dutch would have it) and when the Dutch scouts decided to stage a Gang Show we organised a party to visit the Hague and to see the show, borrowing a scout headquarters to sleep in.  Since then I have visited the Low Country on many occasions, although, sadly, it is now a good many years since my last visit.

When the Dutch scouts put on their second Gang Show, we made another trip.  This time, however, somebody decided that we should take a cake decorated with the scout emblem and the British and Dutch flags.  The idea was that I, still being the Big Cheese, would inveigle myself onto the stage as the cast took a curtain call.  I would then present the cake as a token of the friendship between the scouts of the Hague and those of Hove & Portslade.  It seemed to me that although virtually everybody in the Netherlands speaks English, it would be a matter of courtesy for me to speak in Dutch.  It just so happened that my then boss had married a Dutch girl so I wrote down what I wanted to say, she translated it and he recorded it for me to learn parrot-fashion.  Hence the "Het geeft me veel plezier" in the title - the opening words of my speech.  This went down such a storm that I never did utter more than the first sentence!

On one of our visits, with my family and also my friend Chris and his family, we made our way to the railway station just for the thrill of watching the guard/conductor on a train watching the clock at the end of the platform.  As soon as the second hand hit the 12, he blew his whistle and the train departed on time to the second.  (This might seem a little odd but it was something we had never seen before as British trains were never on time.  Plus ca change etc.)  Wandering back through a shopping mall - all the shops were closed as it was a Sunday - we heard the strains of traditional jazz and as we rounded a corner, there in front of us, holding an impromptu session, was Chris Barber and his band!  That is the one and only time I have seen him live, but the CD playing at the moment has a track of his coming up shortly.

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Supper menus seem to be just the thing recently.  Saturday - toad in the hole.  Sunday - roast gammon.  Monday - smoked mackerel.  Yesterday - steak and kidney pudding.  Today - wait and see!

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I've been trawling through stacks of 35mm slides trying to find the pictures I took in Holland all those years ago.  One I did find was this pic of Stonehenge.  It must come from the time when I was experimenting with copying and merging slides as I have no recollection of visiting Stonehenge when the sun was as low as that.