A walk through the history of our new home

A wonderful thing about Denmark, is that they seem to have photo-documented it from the sky in a significant amount of detail, as far back as the 1940s! That means that although I now simply live in a large white bungalow, I can see not only how my house looked when it was a working farm, but also what they did with the garden, field and outhouses. The amount you can zoom in is also quite amazing for the time. So here goes:

I've taken a current google satellite shot and drawn the boundary of our garden on it as a guide before uploading the older pics just as a starting point.

2020

And here's a front shot from the schedule when we bought it in 2019.

2019

So, the first aerial shot I found was from 1948, taken from the right hand side as you are looking at it on the photo above. At this point it would have been 43 years old, as the deeds say it was built in 1905.

1948

The house is a third smaller as the extension on the left hand side which houses our bedroom, Amaia's, the living room and the turret room had not yet been built. It had a sweet little thatched roof, a large outhouse and a small thatched garage where we now only have a little fenced-in bin area. The next door neighbour, which is simply a residential house now, seems to be the corner shop back then - now that would have been useful for a pint of milk! And across the road I can see a petrol pump too, which would also have been nice! Although the front lawn in our garden is grass, the majority of what we now have as a front lawn seems to be an orchard back then. What a pity that's gone, although we now have an orchard behind the house so maybe that was simply moved up.

The next shot I found was from 1949 and taken from behind the house.

1949

To a certain extent this one is less interesting as you can only see the back of the outhouse, the thatched rood and chimney but it is interesting to see that the garage across the road also seemed to be a shop back then. And it's sweet to see the neighbours, complete with celebratory Danish flag, out looking up at the photographer. I wonder if the tree in the foreground is the one we park beside today?

Skipping forward next to 1953 and we have an almost identical shot to the 2020 satellite picture above. Here's the outline but I'll include a larger shot of the same below.

1953

The barn at the very back of our current garden isn't yet there and the garage and tool room we have at the front of the field is missing too. The front lawn seems to be half fruit trees, half vegetables back then. And I wonder if the tree behind the outhouse in this is our wonderful old oak tree in an earlier iteration (see the big tree half covering our garage above).

1953 seems to have been quite a prolific year. The next shot from then seems to be annotated.

1953(2)

Key for non-Danish speakers

zink - zinc
straa - straw (cute that they've used the pre-1948 spelling here)
rød - red
vand - water

So our house used to be red brick on the front! And by the looks of this there was a little girl living here back then - she looks around 10 so she'd be 77 now! I wonder who she is!

Moving forward, we're still on 1953.

1953(3)

It looks like the little girl has an even smaller sister. This is the first shot on which I can see a water pump in the garden and a little shed.

And here's the last one I found from 1953. It shows the neighbour's lake nicely and also our neighbour who lives up the lane - these days their house is only visible in winter when the trees are bare.

1953(4)

I found nothing from 1954, but they seem to have flown over again in 1955.

1955

Now there's a baby in our house - isn't that a sweet pram going up our driveway?! This baby must be 65 now! A few more family members can be seen on the front lawn too. I swear the hedge is the same!😁

In 1956 they seem to have taken the first colour shots. Ironically the quality is slightly less sharp, but it is interesting all the same. This one seems to have been taken in winter which might account for the less bright colours.

1956 (1)

It seems the area all around the neighbour's lake was cultivated back then. You can see it better on the black and white one taken at the same time.

1956 (2)

Next up we have 1959

1959 (1)

I like this one a lot. It is the first time I get to see the back. There is a little thatched chunk jutting out where I now have the laundry and shower room, and Léon's bedroom window is clearly visible and still looks the same. I presume when it was double glazed they made exact copies of the original windows, which is nice. The family make another appearance in the front garden too.. Who were they? I can also see some cages of some sort in the bottom right, where we now have the turret room. Are the chickens, rabbits or what? 

Further afield I can make out that the garage across the road also had an ice cream stand - how sweet is that? This must have been a much more exciting place to live before it simply became a commuter village of Odense. Having zoomed in, I can see the sign reads Hesselager flødeis and on googling that I found how it must have looked close up. See this link. Nice car at the Gulf garage too!

1959 (2)

This is the best view of the right hand side and the little thatched garage behind - how I wish we'd inherited that too, it's so cute!

We've almost got to the end of what I have managed to track down so far, but here's a very friendly one from the family who lived here in 1961.

1961

The only other photo I have managed to track down was from the ground, not the air, and dates from around 1985. Little had changed with the main house even then - there's no extension yet and it's still thatched, although it has now been painted to its current white instead of the red of the previous shots but already the outhouses and thatched garage seem to be missing in this one so I guess the working farm was no more by then.

1985

100

It was my birthday on Tuesday. Today I am 52 years and 2 days old. It is Thomas's birthday on Saturday. Today he is 47 years, 363 days old. So I guess that means today, together we are turning 100. At least that explains how my body feels most mornings when I wake up these days! 😂

Bereft

Don't even speak to me today! There are no words to explain how utterly bereft this whole pantomime is making me. Tonight at midnight (my time) my country, the one I love and call-ed home, ceases to exist. Tonight at midnight everything I have done with my adult life becomes undoable by my fellow UK citizens. Half my countrymen have decided that the way I lived my entire adult life is illegitimate and unacceptable. I have studied at university in Italy and Germany, I have worked in France, I have married a Frenchman (and divorced him) and I have married a Dane. Both my husbands also happened also to be half German, so I've had a French father-in-law, a German one, I've had a German mother-in-law and a Danish one. I have French nieces and Danish ones. I have lived and studied in Denmark too now. My German mother-in-law lived in France. My Danish in-laws live in Italy. My daughter is talking about possibly moving to Spain... Not acceptable, nope! Don't dare befriend those nasty foreigners and move abroad. That is no longer acceptable!

Today, I am more than sure that the single greatest gift I gave all my children was a foreign father and therefore a second passport. Their freedom to live, study, work and love all over Europe, as I have done, continues into tomorrow morning, while that light goes out for their friends, their cousins, their family, even their mother. I escaped in time to get an EU residence permit but the middle years of my 50s will no longer be a time for slowing down, relaxing and enjoying my growing family, they will now be filled with anxiety as I continually look behind me until the day comes in 2025 when I can again apply to be an EU citizen. And I am utterly distraught to think of my daughter's uni friends who are studying French and Spanish with no right to go there after uni and my younger kids' ex-classmates who are currently working their way through the education system with a much-curtailed future ahead of them.

I cannot imagine being on UK soil today... even here I can barely breathe. I can't actually imagine setting foot there again, though of course I love my family dearly. I want to teleport my old uni friends Linda and Gillian here today and spend the evening hugging them and crying together because I know what this means to them - we lived together all over Europe and those were the best of times. Gillian's kids will not have the opportunities mine still have, and yet they have done nothing different to mine. And for what? So the little Englanders can wave their union Jacks and taunt our nearest and dearest with their childish rhetoric. I am so embarrassed for them.

I even find myself casting my mind back to my dear friend Sheina, who died many years ago now, because I know she too would have been inconsolable tonight. Remember the Freiburg Bierfest, Sheina? I'm sure you do... Tonight, I will lift a glass and toast you too, wherever you are now.

I want to sit and drink with my 'breast friends' too. I know how awful this all is for my dear friend Karen too - as an academic, this is doing nothing for her university's future or for the research people like her want to be involved in. Nor is it great for her daughter who is just back from a year in France.

Today I sat in my adult education class with every nationality under the sun - there are nearly 25 in the class and almost no duplicate nationalities. And do you know what? It is fascinating and they are all lovely and there isn't one person in that room I wouldn't do anything I could to help. Some are young enough to be my kids, some grew up behind the iron curtain, some fled the bombings in Syria. We are all different and fascinated by our differences. By discussing them, we can become friends. The world is not a frightening place when you open your arms to others, it only becomes that way, when you close your door, and tonight I become homeless, as my country's door closes. Tonight and for the next five years, I will be a citizen of nowhere, until one day I become a citizen of Denmark, but in truth, my country has always been and will always be Europe. And that is why I could not have stayed behind for the shitshow.

Tonight I also want to bus over Marcel and Charlotte and hold them tight. They only exist because I was allowed to fall in love with a fellow EU citizen. None of my kids would be here without freedom of movement, so the future generations of kids like mine will simply cease to exist. I want to kiss and hug them because I know now how precarious their existence actually is. The Marcels, the Charlottes, the Léons, the Annas and the Amaias of the next generation will never be born. And that makes the UK a smaller and darker place.

So if you'll excuse me, I'll now go and hide under my duvet till some time after my birthday, by which time I expect I may need to come back out and eat, but please, just don't talk to me today.

In the meantime - here's a wee song I learnt when I was in France - that's what Europe means to me. I'd rather listen to that than today's news.

Here are the lyrics:

Bien sûr, ce n'est pas la Seine 

Ce n'est pas le bois de Vincennes 

Mais c'est bien joli tout de même 

A Göttingen, à Göttingen 

Pas de quais et pas de rengaines 

Qui se lamentent et qui se traînent 

Mais l'amour y fleurit quand même 

A Göttingen, à Göttingen 

Ils savent mieux que nous, je pense 

L'histoire de nos rois de France Hermann, Peter, Helga et Hans 

A Göttingen 

Et que personne ne s'offense 

Mais les contes de notre enfance "Il était une fois" commence 

A Göttingen 

Bien sûr nous, nous avons la Seine 

Et puis notre bois de Vincennes 

Mais Dieu que les roses sont belles 

A Göttingen, à Göttingen 

Nous, nous avons nos matins blêmes 

Et l'âme grise de Verlaine 

Eux c'est la mélancolie même 

A Göttingen, à Göttingen 

Quand ils ne savent rien nous dire 

Ils restent là à nous sourire 

Mais nous les comprenons quand même 

Les enfants blonds de Göttingen 

Et tant pis pour ceux qui s'étonnent 

Et que les autres me pardonnent 

Mais les enfants ce sont les mêmes 

A Paris ou à Göttingen 

O faites que jamais ne revienne 

Le temps du sang et de la haine 

Car il y a des gens que j'aime 

A Göttingen, à Göttingen 

Et lorsque sonnerait l'alarme 

S'il fallait reprendre les armes 

Mon cœur verserait une larme 

Pour Göttingen, pour Göttingen 

Mais c'est bien joli tout de même 

A Göttingen, à Göttingen 

Et lorsque sonnerait l'alarme 

S'il fallait reprendre les armes 

Mon cœur verserait une larme 

Pour Göttingen, pour Göttingen

Aldi, Newton Mearns

Wee heads-up to my Newton Mearns mates: be careful if you're out shopping down in Greenlaw village. Someone opened my mum's handbag and removed her purse in Aldi on Tuesday without her noticing. They have CCTV footage of the theft but that's cold comfort. She now has the hassle of cancelling all her cards, driving licence, dealing with police and not having any way to pay for anything for the next week etc. Lowlifes.🤬

The only good news is that she'd just given all her cash to my nephew for his birthday last week, so all that was in her purse (now she's cancelled the cards) was a ticket to a Cliff Richard concert this autumn. Hell bloody mend them - I suspect it won't be exactly what they will have been hoping for! 😂

Shitty new passports

The girls's new passports just turned up. Ten days to go till the lunatics finally take over the asylum and still, they have decided to make the new ones a little sadder and more insular. I feel my wee multi-national girls have been cheated.

I'm so glad they still have another option to keep their ability to work, study, travel, live and love all over our beautiful continent, rather than being isolated on a nasty little inward-looking island. I hope, by the time their next renewal comes around, the government back home will have begun to come to its senses.

All my little uprisings

When I lived in Italy in '86 one of my flatmates was in a fairly unhappy relationship at home, so took her summer school in Perugia as an opportunity to have some no-strings-attached romantic fun... She first tried chatting up our middle-aged, rather sleazy landlord Elio, after some fun there she moved on to an Iranian bloke whose name I can't remember, followed by Gavin from England and finally Frank from Bremen. Frank became a bit of a fixture in my flat for the latter half of the summer and early autumn and one thing that made me laugh was the fact that Frank had got it into his head that the word 'offspring' was in fact 'uprisings' - I guess he remembered it was some kind of preposition followed by some kind of upwards-directional verb. Whatever went through his head, no matter how many times we all corrected him, he persisted in talking about mothers and their little uprisings all autumn. It still makes me smile today whenever I hear that word, so in dedication to my long-lost German acquaintance, Frank, here is a rare photo on Christmas day 2019 of all my little uprisings. 😂

Need a name

Léon is very sweet. He's fully taken to his new life and is trying very hard to embrace everything as a true Dane. Last week he bounced home and pointed out he had noticed on his walk home that almost all the bigger houses around here have names: there is, of course, Rugård, which our street is named after, there is also Damgård, Banggård, Hjørnegård and several more. The thing they all have in common is the gård as they are old farms, so given our house was also once a tiny farm, he's decided it also needs to be X-gård. He thought long and hard about it then decided the obvious name for him to give our house is Hyggegård, because, to him, life in Denmark is just epitomised by hygge! I'm sure I'm going to come home some night to him painting it in Gothic script above the archway into the house! Love that boy!😂

Days 2 thru' 4

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Just keeping a picture diary here of progress with the 'annex'. 

Still love a typo

Saw this in Ikea last night - please someone pay me to proofread stuff, you know you want to!

Winter lighting

Aha! I was right. My theory from back in November turns out to have been spot-on. There are two separate things here in Danish culture - there's the Xmas tree which goes up in the ten days before Xmas and comes down the first week in January as we Scottish people might expect and then, completely separately, there are garden lights that first started appearing just after the clocks changed on to winter time and are still about now after all the Xmas trees have been abandoned. Here's my neighbour's flagpole tonight.

I'm now only waiting to see if they simply hang about till the days get longer around my birthday, or if they stay up fully till the clocks change back to summer time!

Day One

Today marks day one of the great conversion. When we moved in here we had not only a 70-odd m2 garage but also a further garage and tool room that was even bigger and a barn of the same size.

Given we also have a big enough driveway that we have managed to have all Thomas's work colleagues round at the same time with their cars, we decided we could dispense with the main garage and convert it into a kind of spare/extended part of the house, not only so the two older kids could have a room to call their own, but so we could house our crazy numbers of books and have people to stay in the summer (or whenever). This garage is larger than the upper floor of our house in Kinloch, so adding it is no small thing - it will take the living area up to about 300m2 (almost double what we had in Scotland - 162m2). Not to mention, both it and the main house are bungalows with proper roof space, so should we one day win the lotto, we can actually double the size of our house! So, this is going to be an on-going feature, but today is perhaps the last time, in our time of residence, that our garage is going to look like this!

 

Ten year challenge

I saw lots of people at new year uploading 'ten year challenge' photos, because we'd changed decade. I decided against that. I didn't find my forties to be a particularly stress-free decade and 41 definitely looked a lot better than 51. However, having taken a photo on Xmas day of me and all my kids together, I realised how seldom I am in a photo with all five as I am the family photographer, so I thought that ten year challenge might be more fun - let's face it: the kids have changed even more than me so might detract from my aging process! So here goes😁

All of us in 2010.


All of us last week.

Passport renewal in Brexitville

The girls have been registered as Danish nationals since they were eligible - that is to say Anna became a Danish citizen upon our marriage when she was 14 months old, and Amaia has been Danish since birth. For some reason, children born abroad to a Danish father are not allowed to be Danish (unless the rules have changed in the last ten years) unless their parents are married. In fact, that was the primary reason Thomas and I married. We were a bit long in the tooth otherwise, or I was at least...

Anyway, that means that for the last decade both have been running on two passports - their UK one and their Danish one. Each has been renewed in turn - the Danes showed no interest in their UK one, the Brits previously simply asked if they had another, then issued the new UK one as soon as they received the photo with the usual 'I certify this looks a bit like X' guff on the back.

This time, when I filled out the online forms, it said Anna was old enough to sign her passport so could self-certify, which is new for us. Amaia on the other hand is still under twelve (the age a UK passport holder is required to sign - it is different in Denmark as both girls signed previous passports despite only being six when they were issued) so required a friend, not relative, who had known her at least two years, who was a UK resident and UK passport holder to confirm her identity. Obviously this is possible for us as we've not long left, but I wonder how I'd have fulfilled this requirement if I had moved away when she was a few months old and lost contact with home - she would still be eligible for a UK passport, but finding someone to confirm her identity would not have been a given. So, there must be many a British child out there who is finding it rather difficult to get the passport they are due. Who would have thought this UK government would make it difficult for ex-pats to get a passport?!😡

And that was when the fun began. I asked my sister from another mother, Linda, to help out. She was happy to, especially given she had done her neighbour's child two months ago so knew it was simply a case of okaying a photo and providing her own passport number and job title... or so it was with the UK-based child who lives below her... Suddenly Amaia's passport application morphed out of all recognition. First Linda was asked to confirm the photo and give her passport details - all well and good, then she was asked Amaia's date of birth, which she only knew roughly so had to ring me. She was then asked Amaia's current address, my date of birth, my place of birth, Thomas's date of birth, Thomas's place of birth, then Amaia's place of birth, then to confirm she knew me to be Amaia's biological mother! (Seriously!) I swear they stopped short at asking my bra size or whether Thomas sleeps in PJs or naked. I mean to say - it really helps to have goooood friends if this is the number of hoops they have to go through to help you out. I am seriously beginning to wonder if the UK is trying to make it so hard to get a passport when you live elsewhere or are a dual national, that they hope non-residents will simply find it easier to drop that second nationality in the long run. If that is what they are counting on to rid themselves of us, they aren't reckoning with the level of our stubbornness!

Over and above these issues, there is no longer an option to pick up at a consulate the way my older kids did with their French passports last year, and there was also no option to have a relative pick them up or receive them in the UK but the compulsory surcharge to have it sent to your foreign home address in the EU is nearly £20 per passport. So, despite a child's UK passport costing £58.50, these came out at £75.86 each, for just five years!

Finally, their last hoop is that they want me to photocopy both sides of every page in the girls' Danish passports ('whether they are blank or not') and send them a paper copy of that along with their current UK passport before they can get to work on their new ones.

Sixty-four sheets of A4 and two passports in a special delivery envelope. That isn't going to be cheap either. Sigh, grrrrr!

Passport renewal

In my house we have twelve passports. That could go up to thirteen if Thomas manages to regain his German one (which his dad signed away when he changed nationality when Thomas was ten) and even fourteen, in five and a half years time when I become eligible for a Danish one... Passports are expensive little buggers though, and this morning I've found out that they are more expensive if you need them to courier them abroad - £75.86 for a child's ex-pat passport, and that is without factoring in that they want me to send over their current UK one and a photocopy of every page (and it states 'including any blank pages' 😡) of any other passports they hold, before they will make a start on their application!

There are some odd rules, I have to say. Anna is fine, at over twelve, she can self-certify her identity with a signature, but at ten Amaia has to have a fellow UK citizen verify hers (which is odd given she already had to sign her Danish passport which she last got renewed at the age of six!) So the full rules state that the certifier needs to be a UK citizen with a UK passport, living in the UK and not related to Amaia. Given Amaia is eligible for a UK passport because I am a UK citizen (and she was born there), these requirements are odd. Had I flown here with her at birth and never returned, no one in the UK could fulfil these requirements, so she'd not be able to get a passport till she was twelve. And it's all a bit over-complicated, given she is recognisable from her old photo.

I also think the cost is a bit steep for five years. Already the standard £56 is more than the adult price for the equivalent duration. I would definitely be tempted to start using only their Danish ones, if I didn't think our current fascist-in-chief might use that as an excuse to deny them their citizenship at some point further down the line.

Nice surprise

I noticed from day one there was a loft hatch in my garage but I hadn't bothered venturing up. I'm not sure why I didn't, probably because it was a garage so I figured it would be a bit of a pointless little place. Given my garage is about 80m2, so the same size as the upper floor of my house in Kinloch, why I hadn't considered it might be as useful as the loft there was, is beyond me.

Last week we had in the builders to look at converting it to a three bedroom, one public room annex, so I pulled on the hatch to see what was up there. My first surprise came when this built-in ladder unfolded to the floor, so it was already one up on Kinloch. I climbed up and found it was fully lit and partially floored, definitely as big as my old one so I was well pleased. On further inspection, I found the previous owner had left behind something that would be of no use to her now she is in a flat in the city...

The kids are going to be beyond excited when I introduce them to the contents this summer:

December 20 2019

For fun on the last day of school, given there are no uniforms, so you can't have a dress as you please day, Léon's class decided to have a 'come dressed as a...' day. The 20 odd kids in the class came up with things the others should dress as, and stuck them in a hat. His (male) friend got the 'come dressed as a girl' card, etc. Léon, of course, got the 'come dressed as a tourist to the Caribbean' card! Six degrees wasn't enough to discourage him wandering the streets all day like this, and he definitely got a funny look from the school bus driver. You can't say he's a party-pooper... I'm just hoping he doesn't come down with triple pneumonia before the holidays!

#GE2019

England has lost its mind, its heart and its soul. And although Scotland has voted against everything England has championed, I suspect once again we will be dragged to the depths by it, kicking and screaming. I'm so desperately sad for my kids, my family, my friends and all the good people back home. The place I called home for the best part of half a century is about to be wiped off the face of the earth.

It's just not right!

I'm in Scandinavia now. Xmas should be all dark nights and cold and twinkly gardens with candles oozing that hygge all the magazines back home love to mention.

The kids have made little winter scenes with red candles and snowmen and Thomas has bought one of these advent candles (I swear you have to burn the bugger for about ten hours a day to get through it, it's so beefy - we're still playing catch-up!)

I think you are meant to do something with four candles too, but we never got round to that.

But I'm a Glasgow girl, one who grew up in the 70s and I know it is wrong but every night when we go to bed and Thomas blows out this monster candle, I am immediately transported not to Santa and Lapland but to 1975 and my parents' giving us the monthly treat of a Vesta chow mein (we sure knew how to live it up in the 70s!) The four of us would re-hydrate this delicacy, steep the soft noodles and fry the lurid yellow crispy noodles in the old chip lard and then keep it all warm on one of those very 70s plate warmers with the tealight candles underneath. At the end of our treat one of us kids got to blow out the tealights. So for me candles will always evoke boxes of Vesta. 😂

Petrol pricing

At home, I found petrol prices would hover around a figure, shifting very little until there was some spurt or other, then they'd jump a couple of pence and stick again. Almost all garages in the one area are within a penny of each other, rural places are more expensive and motorway service stations are best avoided price-wise. That is how things have been since I first got behind a wheel in '85.

I'm starting to notice Denmark just isn't like that. At first, before I had a real handle on the currency, I didn't notice much so I decided to try to work out the cheapest garage between Bogense, where I was living at first, and Morud, where the school was (a 21km stretch). The first thing I noticed was that as I got closer to the big city - Odense - it often got dearer, not cheaper - odd. The next thing I noticed was that it was not overly predictable which would be cheapest on any given day and finally the price would fluctuate more than I was expecting.

So, over the last month I decided to observe it much more closely. There are three main garages near me - two supermarkets and one Shell. Not only does the price fluctuate wildly between around 10.19 and 11.39 a litre (approx £1.15 & £1.29), it can go from one to the other and back within the space of 24 hours. I'd go as far as to say the price changes every single day, sometimes twice a day. I have concluded that whenever the price goes above 11 Kroner, I simply should wait till the following day when it'll be back down nearer 10. It's really odd to watch. (I've also now worked out that the Netto supermarket is definitely always the cheapest near me, if anyone happens to be in my neighbourhood.)

Flyverdragter

How cute is Amaia in this shot from November 2010... with her wee cute lilac snowsuit and her rosy cheeks!? Babies and toddlers always look so happy and cosy in winter.

Back in Scotland, a big thing in primary schools is the 'wet weather activity book', mine often shortened it: 'Mum, did you put my wet weather in my bag?' - the mind boggles - what is that? A bag full of slush and rain water? Anyway, at my school when I was a child and at my children's primary school, you were meant to provide your child with something to do when they were kept in on rainy or snowy breaks and lunch times. We tried colouring books when they were wee, moving on to packs of cards and novels as they advanced through the years.

But here's an idea. In Denmark, there are no 'wet weathers'. There are just snowsuits for big kids! These aren't your expensive Val d'Isère numbers, these are standard issue, available in all supermarkets and expected to be owned by all primary-aged kids suits, that they wear/take to school so they can play outside all the time. And they are for real use - they aren't meant to look pristine, they often come home caked in mud or whatever. It isn't that the weather is different here. The summer was a wee bit better but so far the autumn and winter have been bog-standard Scottish, both in temperature and in volume of rain.

It's sweet, because Amaia associates these suits with babies, she's taken to calling it her 'cute suit' rather than 'flying suit' as the Danes refer to it, but I have to say since she bought it there's been no turning back - she's content to be out in all weather and I've even found her happy to walk the 3km home from school on occasion, if I've been busy!

Update on the voting front

I was having a good old rant last week about my voting papers. Having been in Scotland for 48 hours more than three weeks ago, my mother (in my constituency) already had her postal vote sitting ready to send, having applied when the election was called. Sensing the way things were going in the UK, I had applied to be on the voters' register in late summer and had filled out my postal voting request mid-October, but by the beginning of December there was still no sight of it. I emailed the electoral body and was told not to worry as the foreign postal votes were being sent out on December 2. Even without factoring in the inevitable delays caused by Xmas post, surely sending out ballot papers to foreign destinations nine working days before an election is cutting is a bit fine?

Inevitably, they turned up around 2pm on Monday - that is December 9, for an election in another country four days later. I was seething.


Had I not known mum had been sitting on her papers for at least three weeks when mine arrived, I'd have been annoyed, but this made me incandescent. I would love to know who exactly took the decision to send polling cards out to UK citizens living in EU countries, when there is little chance of them getting back on time, for an election being fought along pro- and anti-EU lines, with the government and local politician firmly in the anti-camp. I will, of course, be making a formal complaint, but that will be of little comfort if my family's entire future is changed by the result of this election.

Still, I decided on balance, I was at least better trying to return it.

Denmark is an annoying place when it comes to the post (think I might have been caught shouting 'Why is the Danish postal service so fucking stressful?' on Monday afternoon!). If you are foreign, or don't have the best Danish, you might as well throw in the towel... I can only just cope with it after many years listening to Danish. Denmark feels like it is ten years ahead of the UK on the phasing-out of the post office to me. There don't seem to be any actual post offices in Nordfyn (my council area), not even in the big towns, instead you have to google where post office counters are hidden - often in supermarkets, corner shops or in my case, the nearest one with an afternoon uplift is inside a gift shop, 6km away from my house. (My nearest one is actually in the Coop next to the girls' school but it only has morning uplifts). To do this you need to be good enough at Danish to know how to google it because you aren't looking for the word post office, you are looking for Postnord - the name of the service. You then have to google postal uplifts, because the post boxes in the street all only have one uplift and that is usually early morning. Finally, when you arrive at the supermarket/garage/gift shop, you have to be able to explain why you are there and what you are wanting, which obviously you don't in the UK. If you have no English and you walk into the post office, there's a high chance you're after a stamp of some sort, but here in a Coop or gift shop, a stamp is usually the least likely thing you are after! Furthermore, because post is being used less and less, it has become both more expensive and less able to be tailored to your needs, so I could send it tracked or normal, but neither got it there any faster. The woman explained she thought there was only a 50% chance of it arriving on time, and of course she is probably unaware of the UK obsession with Xmas cards that doesn't really exist elsewhere in Europe, and their knock-on effect on Xmas deliveries so I imagine I'm looking at a more than 50% chance of paying for a stamp to send it back and still be disenfranchised. When I showed her it was my postal vote she smiled and said in Danish - 'Ahhh, you have to vote to get rid of that man!' No mention of which man but when I nodded she did seem to stroke my letter kindly as she dropped it in the postal bag - I expect she'd put two and two together and worked out that if I was living abroad and at least attempting a conversation in a foreign language, chances are I wasn't a raging Brexiteer.

Back in the UK, I'm still astounded at current polling. That someone so obnoxious, deeply offensive and incompetent, with no policies or plans can be polling 40% of the vote is mind numbing. This isn't someone we can simply swap out in five years. Five years from now the NHS and the economy will be unrecognisable. The country that already has the largest gap between rich and poor in Europe will have even more inequality and that isn't what makes for the best, happiest or most successful places. And in my own constituency, if the Tory gets back in despite the 75% Remain vote in 2016, I guess that means people are ok with their MP making no attempt to represent their wishes, and on a more personal note, it will mean people I consider neighbours and even friends will have been ok with the way EU families like mine have been treated.

Made in Søndersø

It is interesting to compare places of a similar size. Near where I live is a town called Søndersø. It has a large crisp producer (as you can see from the image) selling through all the local shops and the Aldis, Coops etc. It has a primary school, the main high school for the whole area and the council's specialist music school. It has 4 Aldi sized supermarkets, a bank, a large chemist etc so I was surprised when I checked at home and found it is only the same size as Eaglesham, population-wise.

The weirdest things

You come across the weirdest things sometimes - this looks more like the Loch Ness monster than any of the statues kicking about Drumnadrochit, and yet we're in Otterup - a wee holiday town on Funen. Further investigation has led me to conclude it is actually the Norse Midgårdsorm, but going forward, I'll definitely be selling it to any Scots tourists as Nessie on her holidays 😉

EX-pat voting rights

What an absolute joke the Westminster voting system is! Apart from the obvious fact that you can get a majority with 75%+ of the country voting against you, if you happen to have your very own unique brand of madness, not split with your close competitors, as we do on the right-hand wing of this election....  But for now, I'll forgo a rant about first past the post and simply get to the point I'm trying to make about people like me.

Obviously this vote is fairly close to my heart given I am living abroad, in Brexile if you like, exactly because of the current state of madness back home. But of course family and friends still are back home, so it is still central to my life... Whether I will ever live in my home country again at some point down the line will potentially be decided eight days from now. It'll influence whether my son and daughter might be best fleeing over the next few years (because they are lucky enough to own a second passport and therefore the ability to do so). It will determine whether my nephews and niece will still have access to first-class higher education at some point down the line or whether UK unis start to bomb imminently, it will impact upon healthcare for my mother who is in her mid-70s etc.

For this reason, I registered to vote back in September - call me psychic. For this reason, I also applied for a postal vote on October 26. Given it needs to get to me and I then need to fill it in and post it back, I emailed them on Monday to ask why it still hasn't arrived and was told I wasn't to worry because mine was being sent out that day. They sat on it from October and sent it out on 2/12, knowing it needed to get to Denmark and back by 12/12 - ie they gave it at very best nine working days? And guess what? It still hasn't bloody arrived and if it does turn up tomorrow and I manage to turn it round and get it back by next Thursday, it'll more be down to fluke than good planning. Given my mother was already sitting with her East Ren polling card back on 22/11 when I dropped by for a visit, I'd love to know why they think the foreign ones are best going out last? Could it be because those of us living in EU countries, directly affected by Brexit are least likely to vote for our current (useless) MP?

Anyway, watch this space. I am sure I'll be updating you on whether EU-dwelling Brits are being disenfranchised or not, in the very near future. Grrrrrr.

Xmas lights

We've been prettifying the house and garden with nice lights - there's much more scope here with a big house and garden. After we put up a few, we heard the previous owner traditionally wound lights round every single tree in the garden (well, that's not happening!) but I think we're holding our own as the village has its own Facebook group and the self-appointed mayoress has congratulated all the inhabitants this week on their festive hygge.

So far we've down the hedge and the house, and we've added a wee flowery tree too outside the turret.

            

The kids are still working on Thomas to acquire this for the flagpole - let's see who wins that one.

Tinka og Kongespillet

I think I have mentioned the concept of TV advent calendars more than once over the years. In Denmark the national TV channels put on a wee 'advent calendar' in the form of a kiddie Xmas soap opera for the 24 days of December. Twenty (approx) minute episodes of a Xmas-themed kiddie story, knee-deep in magical elf people all dressed in red pointy hats, kings, queens, snow, horses, thatched cottages etc etc. They aren't overly taxing on the brain (we're two episodes in and I can already tell how the whole story is going to play out, but Amaia is 9 and she can't so I guess that's the whole point).

They release old ones on DVD so our kids have always followed at least one every December as it was traditional and good for their Danish. But this is the first time we've spent December in Denmark so we're following the current year's one in real time. Now I can see how big it actually is - apparently it was the only topic of conversation today in Amaia's class, after last night's opening episode. Everyone has watched it - male, female, immigrant, ethnic Dane - doesn't matter - there's no get-out clause if you're in that age bracket and understand Danish.

And they're not missing out on the commercial opportunities either. Amaia saw the cardboard Tinka calendar in Coop over the weekend, so is opening windows to see what the current evening's episode is going to be about. She discovered today's was a picture of lanterns this morning but had to wait till 8pm to find out their significance. She also picked up the panini-style Tinka album over the weekend and now they are all taking in cards of the main characters to swap doubles with classmates. It's all very exciting apparently. I'm quite surprised the English-speaking world hasn't jumped on this money-spinning bandwagon. I guess that's what happens when you only have one language on your radar.