Wednesday, May 03, 2023

Nacho Cheese


It's taken six weeks for me to be able to even write the words. Six weeks ago today someone ran my Nacho over and left him dead by the side of the road. All day I shouted and looked for him, knowing in my heart something was wrong. He hated the rain, you see, and was never out in the dark but that day he went out around 9am and when the heavy rain started an hour later, I called him, but he didn't come running down my field, a streak of cream fur against the grass as he always did. 

By midday he was still a no-show and as the rain got heavier, I put on wellies and a coat and tried all his usual haunts, mainly in the fields and the woodlands behind my house. I didn't try out front because he never went out front. He never ventured near the road as it scared him and there was so much nature in the other direction.

By dinner time as darkness was falling, I was beside myself. I stayed up all night with the door open and a plate of his favourite biscuits, just in case he'd been locked in somewhere but he never showed. It was a long cold night on my sofa. It was a long, cold, wet and dark night outside. I couldn't imagine my baby out in the winter rain. At 8am I knew something bad was going on. I dressed and got in the car, thinking I'd go straight from my house towards the next village, but at the last second without knowing why, I turned right onto the road through our village. I knew he was a homebody so once I had gone around four houses, they are spaced out, I figured he must just have got locked in somewhere because he would never have gone any further than that, especially not in that direction. I decided to go as far as the inn where Léon works as that is the easiest place to turn the car. And there I saw something; opposite the last house before the inn, lying on the grass verge on the other side of the road was a ginger cat. 

I pulled to a halt and could see he was dead, stiff but unblemished. He was wet so looked ginger, not cream and for a few moments, I almost convinced myself that it wasn't him but a different missing orange cat. The first thing I was drawn to were his toe beans; they were so pale. Nacho's were always a deep pink, whereas Samosa's are pale, I felt hope for a second before I realised that cold and lack of circulation would take their toll. I willed someone else to be dead instead but I turned this wee man over and he had his one black whisker on his left just like my Nacho, next I checked his head and he had an ear tattoo just like my boy, he even had his extra fang. Nacho had five fangs instead of four, having retained a baby tooth on the right-hand side. My world shattered. There I was with his basket, some treats as I knew he would be hungry after his night's adventure and I suddenly I knew he would never be having treats again.

I laid him gently in the car, in the towel I had brought as I thought he might be wet and cold when I found him.

We'd been having a problems with a cat from the next village over the winter. She's a lovely cat around humans but is very territorial and had decided this side of the road was her territory too. Nach, Mos and Smilla, the tortie next door, didn't agree and she was often seen chasing our cats. 

I wonder if she chased him across the road as he just never went that way. He was way too timid to choose the road side when we own 9000m2 of grassland and forest that he happily spent his whole life in. Only something like that could have spooked him out of his routine.

I have been over that morning in my head so many times, asking myself why I didn't tell Thomas to keep them in as the weather didn't look like it was going to be great. I blame myself, I should have known to keep him home, somehow I should have known. I couldn't sleep for weeks as every time I closed my eyes, he was there again, on the verge, cold and wet. My poor darling boy who hated to be wet, who was never out in the cold and the dark before. My beautiful boy who wasn't yet two. Now he lies under an apple tree he loved to climb. It catches my eye whenever I go out with the bin and sometimes I think how beautiful it is to have him near, other times I cry because he is out in the rain or the cold, which he really didn't like.

The night before he died I took a few photos of him on my phone: one, a live photo, loops. He barely moves so all you can see is his breathing. I would watch it over and again, just to see my boy breathing. I had no idea he had less than 24 hours to live. 

He had the loudest purr of any cat I have ever met, now my house feels a little too quiet. 

Samosa had turned one that week and had never been catless for a single night in her life, having moved from her mum and siblings to being Nacho's shadow, following him about, tormenting him, washing him, loving him. She seems so sad and quiet now. She often stares out the window at the neighbour's cat or chickens, looking curious, but not full of anticipation. Then it happened, this morning. There's another cat in the next village, not the one who was causing the problems, but a pale ginger one who looks similar to Nacho, other than his smaller, greener eyes. He rarely comes up here, but when he does the kids call him 'Fake Nacho' as they are so alike. It was him I thought I had found that morning back in March as he is slightly darker and with wet fur, you look darker. This morning Fake Nach was sitting on our lawn and Mos saw him. Her tail started swishing, she ran up and down the window ledge, standing on her hind legs, miaowing and clawing to get out. She saw her brother who she used to sleep and eat with and who suddenly disappeared and she wanted him back. She was so excited it broke my heart in a million pieces. As she ran up and down watching him, I stood with the tears running down my cheeks. How can I explain to her he isn't coming back when she so obviously wants him to? Her reaction was so different to seeing any other animal in our garden.

To help her and to help us, we decided to get her a wee buddy. He would never be Nacho Cheese, but he will be someone else she can wash and play with and snuggle up to. When we recently visited a family whose cat had had kittens, their daughter talked us into taking two instead of one, the little runt of the litter had no home to go to and our hearts melted. For a five-year-old, she'll make a great saleswoman one day! So tomorrow, Mos finally gets her new playmates after six weeks alone. I hope she will come to love them the way she loved her big brother who we all miss every day. 

Monday, March 13, 2023

You miss the most unexpected things


Denmark is weirdly flat, not quite the Netherlands flat but flat enough that there are points where I have stood on this island (Funen) maybe 10km inland and watched as a thunderstorm sweeps in from the sea with no barriers in its way. The highest point in Denmark is 171m! I am sure I have had piles of garden rubbish back home that could more or less have rivalled that!

As a Scottish person who has been up the odd Munro, I thought I would pine most for the hills and the mountains of home, and I do sometimes. I miss those spongey-looking mountains you get in Scotland where there isn't a tree in sight, just the odd white crumb, that on closer inspection turns out to be a sheep on the hillside. Obviously Alpine mountains look much more spectacular and I marvel at them every time I fly over them to visit my in-laws in Tuscany, but they aren't my home countryside.

Interestingly though, I am beginning to realise that there is something I miss just as much, if not more than the hills from home, but that I hadn't pre-empted: waterfalls. When a country is flat or flattish, there are almost no waterfalls. I was brought up in Newton Mearns so the nearest park, where I went all the time as a child and then with my own kids had this beautiful waterfall. Nearby Linn park also had a beautiful waterfall, unsurprisingly given linn means waterfall! Almost every park I knew in the vicinity of Glasgow had a waterfall, almost every walk I ever went on in nature involved a waterfall.

I loved to photograph waterfalls and to watch them, but even more than that I loved to stand and listen to the power of the water, to marvel at its endlessness, and that is something I took for granted.

When mum was still alive, I used to hire a car when I went to Scotland so could visit all my old haunts and friends but now I tend to stay with my brother in Glasgow in a paid parking zone, I can't. I guess I'm going to have to find myself a public transport waterfall trail for future visits, just to give me my annual dose!

Saturday, February 25, 2023

Samosa


When we got the cats, we discussed whether to give them English names, given we are an English-speaking family, Scottish names, given we are a Scottish family, or Danish names given the cats are technically Danish and will likely spend their entire lives here. The advantage of Danish names would be simpler vet visits and catsitter stays. First of all we googled the top 15 cat names per gender in Denmark and got these: 

Søde kattenavne til hankatte                        Gode kattenavne til hunkatte

  1. Charlie                                                            1. Nala
  2. Winston                                                           2. Fie
  3. Simba                                                              3. Luna
  4. Abyssi                                                              4. Lunka
  5. Sham                                                               5. Fia
  6. Lio                                                                   6. Fortuna
  7. Ra                                                                    7. Desdemona
  8. Calle                                                                8. Maui
  9. Balder                                                              9. Wiwi
  10. Balou                                                             10. Lani 
  11. Bandit                                                            11. Nayla
  12. Evian                                                              12. Mis
  13. Eddie                                                              13. Nanna
  14. Ditlev                                                             14. Åse
  15. Djengis                                                           15. Sussi
The kids rolled their eyes and vetoed the Danish lists. So they started suggesting names from back home. Thomas ruled half of them out as unpronounceable. Eventually they compromised on food items that were (at least potentially) known in both places. So we ended up with Nacho Cheese. 


Nine months later when we got Samosa, we decided to go through other snacks/foods. The girls had Salsa, Chilli, Dorito, Mango etc on the list but couldn't agree. Léon happened to wander in at that moment and point out that Samosas, like Nachos were an orange, triangular snack food and, given she was also partly ginger, it stuck.

I half expected it would get shortened to Sam or Sammy within weeks, but you never know with these things and within days she was being shortened to Mosmos. Amusingly, that in turn gets shortened to Mos, which she seems to like best. And that in itself takes us back to an interesting compromise: Mos is Danish for Mash, as in mashed potatoes, so maybe she ended up with a Danish food name after all!

Friday, February 17, 2023

Store bededag

Anyone who has been living in Denmark since the last general election (1/11/22) knows all about 'Store bededag' or 'Great prayer day'. The new three party coalition centrist government spent a month in negotiations before visiting the Queen and offering to form a government, then out of the palace they trotted and announced their brainwave - if we scrap this one bank holiday, we'll make enough money to fund the entire Danish defence budget, half the health service and god knows all what else. I think they thought Danes, with their great faith in the state, would just nod and happily agree to working an extra 7 hours a year for the good of the land. It is a very secular country after all so I doubt more than half a dozen pensioners actually spend great prayer day praying. But they seem to have miscalculated; Denmark is incandescent with rage with people's protests and sieges of parliament on a daily basis. (Here is an article in English to explain the ins and outs).

Unions think they should have negotiated it, workers want a say, the church isn't happy etc etc. Though, to a man, Danes swear it is entirely about workers' rights, I suspect the crux of it is also partly buns! You see, when Denmark, back in the 1600s, scrapped all the minor religious bank holidays in favour of one great prayer day which falls on the fourth Friday after Easter, everyone other than ministers presumably had to spend the day at prayer. Everywhere is like a ghost town on Store bededag, nothing is open. It's like Christmas day with knobs on! Local bakeries weren't even allowed to open, so they invented these very yummy warm cardamom buns that could be eaten for 24 hours, so everyone could buy them before the bakery shut on the Thursday night. They are quite delicious especially toasted with melted butter on top. Here's a recipe, (but it is in Danish). So, once a year everyone visits a proper bakery and buys dozens of these delights, and the bakeries presumably take in half their annual income in 24 hours! I, for one, am more worried about the loss of this tradition, than I am about the kids being in school an extra day a year!


Anyway we happened to be discussing it over dinner when Léon came out with a rather sweet confession!
You remember when we first moved to Denmark, mum? Well, our school took us all to the outdoor swimming pool to celebrate Store bededag the first two years and because I have never been in a church and know nothing about prayer days, I thought everyone was saying Store badedag (Great bathing day) but just pronouncing it weirdly, maybe in some local dialectSo, I thought we'd moved to the best country in the world! One where the government gave everyone a day off a year so they could go to the pool together and have a lovely time socialising!

What a sweet idea! 

Wednesday, February 15, 2023

Danglish

Danes are great at English. By the time most Danes reach end of Scottish primary school age, they can understand a thousand times more than their Scottish peers have learned in French (or whatever other foreign language their primary concentrates on). They can discuss most topics and understand most accents. By the second last year of high school they are reading Shakespeare in the original! Most Scottish kids in their second last year at high school struggle with Shakespeare even though it is technically in their native language! If anyone considered introducing Shakespeare translated into French or Spanish in a Scottish Higher class, it would be a non-starter! In addition to this all Danes do a minimum of two foreign languages over and above Danish, which would probably not go down too well back home either. So, in principle, I take my hat off to Danes and the level of English they tend to acquire.

The other week Anna (who is in the equivalent of s4 in Scottish terms, (Year 9 in Denmark); she's 15) came home chuckling. 'Guess what my homework is?' she laughed. 'I've to speak to my parents only in English for the whole of the next week!' Can you imagine a teacher back home having the confidence to assume firstly that a child of 15 had enough French to use only that for a week, and secondly that their parents also knew enough to keep it up!? Here it is taken as a given. 

Despite speaking only Danish at school, my kids are in standard state schools, not international schools, they still speak English at home and to each other. They moved here nearly four years ago when they were aged between 9 and 13 but claim 'at home Danish just doesn't feel right,' and yet they all pass as Danish natives outside the house. What is more Thomas always spoke to them only in Danish, even when we lived in Glasgow! I doubt now that it will ever change but only time will tell. So, Anna found her homework far from taxing!

Their above-average level of English comes with a downside however... They are so proficient, they believe their English has reached native in standard, and that's the problem, it invariably hasn't. Somehow the Danish education system instils a huge amount of confidence in its citizens, and they rarely stop to question their own ability. The English textbooks used in Danish schools for the under 16s are as far as I can see written exclusively by Danes and they sure as hell don't think they need a native English speaker to copy-edit them. 

Danes learn British English at school but sit glued to Netflix and watch American media content 24/7, the young (males in particular) game online in English-dominant group chats from their early teens upwards. Léon always says you can tell if a Dane is a gamer or not without discussing computer games; if they speak English with a Danish accent, they don't game, if they speak with an American accent, they almost always turn out to be gamers. This also means that unlike in Scottish schools where 90% of a given Modern Languages class is likely to be female (once they pass the point of compulsory French/Spanish/German), in Denmark young men are often better, at least at the spoken part of English, than their female classmates, who, on the whole game less. 

The result of this mix of English input from a young age is textbooks spelled in British English but which use US terminology, for the most part. Amaia actually had an (approved) English textbook a couple of years ago where one of the exercises stated 'Turn to the person sitting beside you and ask them what colour of pants they are wearing'! I fully get that you can easily ask your neighbor what color their pants are, but you most definitely should not ask your neighbour what colour their pants are, not in a school setting anyway! Danish speakers of English often happily mix different variants of English and jump about in register, using both formal and spoken English within a sentence, and don't even get me started on their use of English swearwords, that's a post in itself, if not a thesis! 

They don't seem to learn about English style either so in a business setting often write long-winded technical texts repeating the same words again and again in what would be considered bad style by a native. When copy-editing English written by a Dane, although there are sometimes no concrete mistakes I often have to break one of their sentences into three or even four before it begins to sound English. When inventing stories for school textbooks, they make cultural errors such as naming the characters badly. I know this sounds a strange, and maybe pedantic point, but they often set a story in a contemporary classroom, the kids all on their iPads, working away, but the kids in this 2023 setting are described as being 12 years old but named Deborah, Helen, Jacqueline, Carol, Gary, and Steven. I had five kids and they had shit tons of classmates, but those names were much more likely to belong to their parents than the kids themselves. I'm half expecting one day to come across a baby Phyllis in one of the kids' text books 😂

As an English expert with over 30 years experience in language publishing, I find it depressing that I can find mistakes or awkward turns of phrase in almost every web page, ad, textbook or talk given in English here, but at the same time really struggle to get anyone to understand the need for a native speaker to proofread anything. I have rarely had as little luck freelancing as I do here. I do get work but not nearly enough! And after a couple of years, I am now seriously considering throwing in the towel altogether and looking for something completely different, despite seeing on a daily basis how useful I could actually be to my adopted country. I once applied for a job writing tourist brochures in English for the island I live on and was rejected with a lovely letter (which sounded rather strange and stilted!) explaining that although I could probably do it faster, I had less local knowledge of Funen, so they had gone for a native Dane instead! This was far from being a one-off!

My kids, all English native speakers who speak English at home and have been educated in the UK are corrected at school by teachers who are somehow confident they know better, (they don't!) I remember Amaia using the word 'Santa hat' in a story she wrote for her English class here: The kids all wore Santa hats on their last day at school in December... Her essay was returned to her with Santa hat underlined and she was told to change it to gnome cap, (she didn't!) Every English 'mistake' they have ever had corrected in Danish school was not a mistake and they have stuck to their guns! But I do find it fascinating. If I was teaching French in Scotland, or Danish for that matter and a native pupil of that language handed in a dialogue they had written, I would ask them to explain their writing to me, I would not assume I am right and the native is wrong!

This whole rant was inspired by Amaia's current homework. Amaia is the equivalent of s1 in Scotland, (Year 6 in Denmark; she's 13). The class is working on short sketches to perform in English for the school. The book the sketches are taken from is entirely in English, written exclusively by Danes and is quite frankly horrendous! In the six pages we're working on, I have counted at least six mistakes. I'm so inspired I am considering writing a book of dialogues for schools and sending it to publishers here, though I know before I even open my laptop to start on it, that it would be viewed with suspicion as it would use turns of phrase the Danes themselves were not familiar with, and the contemporary kids would be called weird and wonderful names such as Olivia, Katie, Adam and Aaron, so it would inevitably be rejected in favour of a reprint of Amaia's appalling little textbook! Strangely, Danes trust Danes much more than they would trust the likes of me to write a school textbook! The errors in this sketch book range from mild:

We will never see our son any more instead of: We will never see our son again
to awkward:
Darling, our son is playing with that devilish device again! Said by a father whose son is playing computer games
to downright Danish:
I'm leaving to go to school now mum, hi! instead of: I'm off to school now, bye!
(The Danish word for Hi is Hej, the Danish word for Bye is also Hej (think Ciao in Italian)).

I have lived many places abroad: France, Germany, Italy and Denmark, and nowhere else do they confidently use foreign speakers of English to write all their English content. Everywhere else I have lived, I could easily find school pupils, students, or even business people to tutor in English. My daughter is always tutoring a minimum of three or four Spanish kids at any given time, they are positively clamouring for native input to improve themselves, but not in Denmark. Back when I lived in Newton Mearns, although my kids were all at one of the top 5 Scottish state schools where the standard of teaching was excellent and the facilities top notch, they were almost the exception in their class as they were the only ones who didn't have a private tutor after school! I have never met a Danish parent who uses tutors in ANY subject, such is their faith, at least here on Funen, in their state education. 

I guess if things continue in this direction, Danglish risks becoming a separate variant of English as they are developing their own way of speaking it, in a bubble and passing it down from generation to generation. It'll be fascinating to watch, though I am already prepared for a great deal of eyeball rolling!

Tuesday, November 01, 2022

ABBA, without mum


In October we went to London to visit Marcel and Milly (and their flatmate, Anton). It had been on our to-do list since they moved there at the beginning of Covid, but for the first year after the pandemic began the world was a bit mad. Denmark did so much better than the UK during the pandemic, the kids all visited me here rather than there whenever possible and I only ventured to the UK to visit mum, not London. The following summer I had a breast operation so couldn't fly until autumn when we needed to go see mum. And by that Xmas mum's quick illness and death meant everyone in the family meeting several times in Glasgow instead of London, once again.

This time last year ABBA had just announced their Voyage Abbatar concert. I knew Marcel lived there, so if I could get to whole family there, we could go. With this in mind I decided it was the obvious Xmas present for the eight of us. I spent ages toying with whether or not to buy mum a ticket for her Xmas too, given she liked ABBA and concerts and it was definitely going to be a show to remember. I put it in the bigger picture of a week in London. Obviously I would not hire a car on a city break, so it would have meant getting her to London, then many buses and tubes all around and probably an airbed at Marcel's. Eventually I concluded that it probably would be too much for someone who would be 78, so didn't get her a ticket. In the back of my mind, I was still tossing up whether to make a separate trip to Marcel's just with mum for maybe a weekend, especially as she had made an annual trip to see him in Edinburgh after he moved there in 2015. She loved being nosey about where he was living and taking him out for a couple of drinks in town and he loved the street cred afforded to him by taking his granny and her pal Joyce on a pub crawl once a year. Mum would have loved to see her first grandchild buy his first house. 

When I booked those tickets the week before Xmas for October 2022, it didn't even cross my mind that she would be dead within two months and all my mental logistics about how to get her to London would be in vain.

So, last week was the concert. I definitely got a wee bit twitchy in the last few days in the run up to it. NOTHING was going to come between me and my trip to see ABBA. When I fell off my ladder a month ago I had decided I was going even if I was on crutches!

ABBA had come to Glasgow in 1979, hence the 'I was sick and tired of everything, when I called you last night from Glasgow' lyrics used in Super Trouper. I was 11 years old at the time and it was long before the Internet. To buy tickets, you had to phone the venue and book them. I was so terrified on missing out, that although I was a painfully shy, phone-phobic child, I rang up only to be told the tickets would not be on sale till the following week. When I rang back the following week, the concert was sold out and I collapsed in a heap on sobs and didn't stop crying for a month... in fact I didn't get over it till last Monday, at the age of 54!

On arrival last Monday, with my husband, my five kids, my daughter-in-law, her mother and her auntie, I was 11 years old again. All the hurt from November 1979 was finally laid to rest. In the queue to go in my darling boy bought me a T-shirt that I was too tight-fisted to buy myself. He sensed how to please his 11 year old mummy on the night! I guess if you work in London banking, concert merch is more affordable! In the foyer many, many people my age wandered around, often accompanied by friends or their kids... so many of the 11 year olds from the 70s. There were people dressed in well-known ABBA costumes, such as the blue and yellow cat T-shirts or the outfits used in the 1979 tour. There were people in 60s flower power dresses, there were sequins, sparkles, platform boots, bearded men in blonde Agnetha wigs, camp, loud, happy people hand in hand, all sorts of exuberance. It was just perfect!


The show was absolutely magical, the sound system perfection. They were so real I could believe I was finally there in the room listening to them sing to me and speak to me. Although we were in the seating rather than the dance floor, everyone was on their feet for the greatest of their hits singing and dancing along. I won't go into details about the content in case anyone is planning on going, but I will say that if you are an ABBA fan, you have to go, no ifs no buts, sell your house if you need to! And I was right, mum would have loved it.😢

I have now vowed to myself, though might not yet have mentioned it to the rest of the family, that I intend to go every time I visit Marcel and Milly. And if anyone is desperate to go but has no one to accompany them, gimme a shout!

 

Greenhouse hell

I'm slowly developing a loathing of greenhouses.

It started in 2009... interesting he didn't buy one in all the years we lived together but waited till we were married to get one. I wonder if he was waiting till I'd signed on the dotted line, making escape harder 🤔.

Yes, in 2009, my beloved other half bought a wee lean-to for our Newton Mearns house. At first I was quite excited, having grown cherry tomatoes in the window of my west end flat and even having bought myself one of those little plastic zipped bags back when I was with my first husband.

I imagined juicy tomatoes galore. 

The model he chose was the masochistic greenhouse model. Every piece of glass was different, all with number codes in the tens of thousands and no pieces of the frames were repeated. The 50 page instruction book nearly beat Thomas, despite his 12-year university education! In a final gasp at putting the bastard together we laid every pane on the lawn and penciled each number on a post-it and stuck it to it. We spent two days working out which piece went where, only to finally realise that glass left on a lawn in June leads to scorched grass that takes a whole season to grow back! I wrote up the whole saga at the time.

I vowed back then never to let him near a greenhouse purchase site again, but 13 years is long enough that I dropped my guard momentarily and suddenly this enormous pallet of metal and polycarbonate was delivered to the middle of my driveway a few months ago.

For some reason, Thomas waited till the weather got autumnal before suddenly deciding it was now the optimal time to build the bugger.

Give him his due, he did 85% of it himself, coming in again and again covered in mud, looking exhausted, but the last 4 days he's needed help. The last 4 days I've had a stinking cold and zero desire to be outside holding massive sheets of polycarbonate while he drills and screws. Suddenly all the kids had other places to be or were simply 'washing their hair' that day and I was 'it'!

Not only did he overrun the weekend, but he needed to take a day of his annual leave to finish it. He'd got it into his head that some storm that was meant to be coming today or tomorrow would see it destroyed, upended and flown off to Oz or similar if all the walls and doors weren't on. I was dubious, but given manual jobs aren't something Thomas is a greater finisher of, I played along, rather than ending up with half a greenhouse for the best part of the next decade.

I came home from my evening class yesterday to find he still wasn't finished so had put up floodlighting. Lucky me! Such bright floodlighting it turns out, that you couldn't even see the frame when you walk eye-first into it😠. We were out till after 10pm in the cold screwing tiny little screws into the frame at ground level lying in the mud, following instructions which were helpfully only written in Cyrillic. Thomas loves a challenge.

The bastard had the cheek to finish up the evening with 'Remind me if I ever have to assemble another greenhouse, that it is best done in summer!' I retorted 'Remind me if you ever have to assemble another greenhouse to find myself another husband!' 

I have since threatened him with ending up under the patio if he even thinks of buying another one, so hopefully my greenhouse days are now over as I am way too old for crawling around in the mud looking for small nuts and bolts.

He still has the door to put on, but found a work-around last night around midnight when it became obvious he wasn't going to get it completely sewn up before the storm. I fear it may end up looking like that for the rest of the winter! Why finish a job 100% if you can leave it 98% done after all?!



Thursday, October 27, 2022

Naw!


Having been at his school, with the same English teacher now for 18 months, Léon decided she was probably up to speed with his Glasgow accent enough that he could stop enunciating quite so much when answering her questions. Asking him something today in the passing, he mumbled the reply 'Naw!' She looked blank, he repeated himself, she looked even more blank. She crossed to the board and wrote down four letters... Is this what you are saying Léon? she asked. He looked up and couldn't help but laugh when faced with the word 'GNAW' hahahaha. Think he'll need to go mid-Atlantic for a while longer!

London

I'm just back from a week in London visiting my son, his girlfriend and their flatmate who have been working there for the last three years. The visit was meant to have taken place years ago but what with Covid, boob ops and my mum's recent death, it didn't materialise till now.

I hadn't actually been to London since 2010. When you have family abroad, holidays don't tend to send you in that direction, though now my family abroad is London, I guess I'll be there more often in the future.

Visiting London post-Brexit is fascinating. As someone whose main friend and family group is based in Scotland, the decline in the UK is glaringly obvious when I go back home. There are more pot holes, more empty shelves, products are dearer or missing, the immigrant shops have closed down, you rarely hear foreign languages in the street any more, the high streets are full of empty retail units, homelessness is on the increase. My daughter, who's in 5th year at Glasgow uni, tells me about the chronic lack of student accommodation to the point that the uni actually messaged people the week before uni started to say that students who hadn't yet found a room should not turn up! (what exactly is that meant to mean if you are half way through a degree?), uni staff members who don't show up till a course is half way through as their work visa hasn't come through yet. Charlotte's six or seven weeks into a course that is yet to receive both a native French speaker and a native Catalan one. I could go on...

London is still a wonderful, vibrant, reasonably well-functioning place! The shops around Marcel's area are still all in use, you hear ten different languages in the space of one tube ride, you can still buy Polish products if you so desire, the roads are in a better state etcetc If you live in London, you could be forgiven for thinking that Brexit has not changed the standing of the UK and given the MPs with the power to do anything about it all live in London 90% of the time, I have to sadly conclude that it will be a long time before the penny drops and they realise that one city cannot support a country of nearly 70 million people. I will never stop being angry and I will never stop mourning the country that used to be so welcoming.



Still, like in Glasgow, the house prices there, as far as I can see, are becoming even more unrealistic than they already were. Marcel and Milly have spent just shy of a half million on a quarter of an old house in Streatham. It is lovely and has great potential but is in need of modernisation but at half a million, it is pricing most young people out of the area. I can see walking around Streatham and Brixton that the people who live there could not afford to move there now, so I'm not sure where their kids will go as they grow up and leave home. Could you afford to pay over 2 million for this house?



It feels slightly like the whole city is on a knife edge and things could suddenly take a turn for the worse when the economy fails to live up to the expectations that have been set for it. I hope I am wrong, given I'd hate to see a housing crash where my child has bought a house.

We were actually there the day the lettuce ousted Truss and within a few streets of Westminster. We wandered over to watch developments in Downing street. There were fifty or so protesters, but for the most part life was going on as usual. Shanghai TV actually stopped and interviewed me, asking whether I thought a change of Prime Minister would solve the UK's problems. I managed both to keep my face straight and to refrain from shouting 'Are you fucking kidding me?' I said that in my humble opinion even a change in government wouldn't solve things given the opposition is so terrified to admit Brexit was a wrong move or prepare people for the reality of the hole they are actually in. The guy almost rubbed his hands together in glee as he filmed the footage, so I guess that was the angle he was looking for.



Wednesday, October 26, 2022

More annoying foreigner rules in Denmark

I have three kids living here in Denmark. All three have lived their whole life with me and Thomas, all three have grown up hearing Danish at home, celebrating odd things like Fastelavn and eating klejner at Xmas. All three sound completely Danish and are somewhere near the top of their class. Unless you have a conversation with them in English and suddenly hear their Glasgow accents, you cannot guess they haven't been here always. Léon, unlike the girls who have picked up standard boring Danish accents, speaks in the local dialect, with a rather Funen accent and I am often asked if he has ever left our island. Some aren't even sure he's ever left Stillebæk! There is only one thing that differentiates my three kids and that is their citizenship. Where Anna and Amaia have Danish and British passports, Léon has a French and a British passport. My marriage to Léon's dad, to be quite honest, was on the rocks long before Léon came along and I had moved in with Thomas before he was a year old. Léon has always considered Thomas as his father and last saw his biological father when he was 6 years old, (he's 17 now). 

As EU nationals we decided to escape the UK when it went down the Brexit route. We did it more for the kids' futures than for either of us, as we could probably have just about muddled through in the UK till retirement, avoiding potholes and improvising toilet roll or whatever!

Until the early 2000s kids who grew up with one or more immigrant parents in Denmark, and who stayed in full-time education through to its natural end, could bypass some of the many adult requirements to gaining citizenship here. That seems only natural given they feel Danish, having grown up here. They didn't need to sit the fairly difficult language exam as they could show their Danish high school diploma instead. They were exempt from the fulltime 4.5 year work requirement, as long as they applied straight after school and went straight to university or further education. I'm not sure whether they got out of the ridiculous citizenship exam (that few Danes can pass, and the other week Anna's class tried in school and all failed). That was abolished a few years back unfortunately so now Léon has a mountain to climb. Léon is at Gymnasium majoring in Samfundsfag (which is like a mix of Modern Studies and Political science) and History, with Danish, English and Spanish all at the most advanced level. So it seems unfathomable to me that when he finally leaves school he needs to sit tests to prove he knows about Danish History, Politics and can speak Danish. Surely showing his high school leavers' certificate should be enough. There is no way he will fail the language requirement as it is two years below the level of his school certificate.

But while these requirements are irksome, the work requirement is the part that really angers me. To apply for citizenship, despite having moved here as a child, Léon will need work for nearly 5 years fulltime before he can apply. I have no doubts he will one day fulfil that requirement but by saying that only work, not higher education counts towards the citizenship requirement, Léon is indirectly being encouraged to go to work after school instead of university. He will leave school around 19 and a degree would take him to around 24, which would mean he couldn't start to work on the employment requirement for citizenship till his mid-twenties. He would therefore be nearly 30 before he could apply to be a Dane, something he already feels himself to be. He will have grown up here, gone through a Danish education system, and will have lived in a Danish family with a Danish father. He could have kids of his own before he is eligible to attempt to be a Dane! 

Léon's young and impatient and although he is definitely bright enough for uni is leaning towards working first so he can become like everyone else. What kind of country pushes bright kids away from higher education, making them into second-class citizens, just to please the knuckle-dragging right wingers?



Annoying bits of Danish bureaucracy...

...or how to make your foreign residents feel like second-class citizens!

I have an ulterior motive for this post, and that is that I hate handbags, always have. It's the main reason I can often be seen sporting an ever-so-uncool bumbag, I just hate the need for a bag. It's a shame really, given my mother left two dozen, in every shade of the rainbow and every size when she died earlier this year. I could have satisfied my life's handbag requirements, no problem back in March, if only my life had required a handbag! I just want to be a bloke and wander about with everything I need in one pocket.

Now I know given the state of my home country at the moment, I really should complain about something so minor, but I feel I have to, given it is unnecessary.

Denmark, like many countries, requires you to have your driving licence on you whenever you are driving. Now that most people have all their credit, debit and loyalty cards scanned into their phones, the only thing left to carry about is that driving licence, or rather it was till a couple of years ago when the Danish State decided to make that an app on your phone too. Hurrah, I hear you call... unless you are a foreign Danish resident, that is😡. As a UK citizen, I was required to swap my UK driving licence for a Danish one back in 2019 when I moved here. I had no issues with that. I went to the town hall, swapped it, had them take a new photo of me to upload to it and one to put on their official centralised records.


As a non-EU (thanks to the shitty Brexiteers) resident of the EU, I am also now required to have a residence permit to live here. That I did too over a year ago and have a foreign resident ID card which again involved a photo of me taken at the Foreign residents bureau and finger printing. So the Danish authorities have two official photos of me and one official set of my finger prints. 

When I go on the driving licence app, however, to download it to my phone to make all my handbag-free dreams come true, it tells me I am not eligible to have it because to do so they need to access the photo they have on my Danish passport records. This works fine for all Danish passport holders and Thomas gets to go out with just his phone, but I still have to carry my wallet at all times because of my licence. How hard would it be for the app to give the following options? Retrieve photo from:

  • Danish passport
  • Danish driving licence
  • Danish residence permit 
I tell you something. I'd definitely consider voting for the party that wants to introduce that after next week's general election... Oh I forgot, I'm not eligible to vote either. Sigh!


Thursday, September 08, 2022

A little too much haste

I have too many windows in my house... 28 to be precise, not to mention the five main doors. I got it into my head, given we're in the middle of a drought, that it would be nice to freshen up the paintwork a little; they're wooden double-glazed units, you see, and I thought it would look better if they were all the same shade of grey/lilac. Off I went to Bauhaus a couple of weeks ago and bought a massive tub of special outdoor wood paint mixed to my colour specifications - the best quality, most expensive they had, mainly figuring it would be cheaper in the long run than me having to paint them annually, which was never likely to pan out. I also thought the whole project was quite doable, given it's a bungalow and none of the window frames is more than two to three metres up and I have no less than three different-sized ladders. 

I was down to having three windows and all the doors left on Tuesday morning. I was particularly pleased that I was yet to run out of paint and that there was definitely enough left. The only thing worrying me was the ominous forecast of rain, starting on Wednesday afternoon, for the first time in months. So, I got out extra early around 8:30am with my Danish audio book, my various brushes, and my glasses for the fiddly bits. 

The sun was quite strong and I could feel it starting to dry up the paint, so time was short. I dragged the ladder into the shade and ran up it, slapping on the paint as quickly as I could while still doing a decent job. I needed to go back down to move another metre to the left. That's roughly when I realised that over-sized crocs, ladders, and haste isn't the best combo... Pot of paint in hand, I somehow missed my footing, falling not just from the top of the ladder onto the patio, but spectacularly bypassing the patio right over the top of the garden wall and landing half way across the lawn in a flower bed, all the while watching in slow-mo as the grey paint rained down on me and the sun-scorched lawn. I was right, there definitely was enough left in the pot, because it managed to cover my clothes, hair, and about 3m2 of the lawn. Lying on the lawn, winded, I could hear my Danish novel in the distance. It was just getting to the exciting bit where the kidnapped journalist was trying to throw molotov cocktails at the serial murderer! I tried to sit up but the searing pain in my left ankle decided that wasn't the best idea. I lay there for a whole chapter looking at my phone on the windowsill, unable to reach it to ring Charlotte to come outside and pick me up or ring anyone else. 

Eventually I managed to crawl in shaking and dripping with paint and text Charlotte that I needed someone to make me lunch. Fortunately a colleague had asked Thomas to drop some crutches off at the hospital for him so I used them for the remainder of the day. But I could not use my foot AT ALL. By day two, still unable to do anything I was forced by the busybodies in my family into a trip to A&E, which is quite different here, but that's one for Contemplating Denmark. I seem to have torn some ligaments in my foot, sigh. And now that the pain of that is getting slightly more bearable on that side, it would appear I also hit my shoulder, arm, side, hip, and bum. I vaguely remember them connecting with the top of the garden wall somewhere mid-flight. Funny how I could only feel the foot for the first day. 

Anyway, as usual, I am being a totally unbearable patient. After two days stuck in a chair, I'm climbing the walls... unfortunately not literally. I cannot stand sitting. I have windows that need painting. I can't drive, so I can't go to Bauhaus to buy the now-necessary replacement paint. I need this to be over now! I can already tell that there is NO WAY I'm spending the advisory two weeks 'resting with my foot up'. I'll give it till the weekend, MAX! 



 

Omelettes, Muslim men, and death

 


This one is a bit more personal than my standard ones, but it gives me comfort and it makes me smile and is a memory I will cherish, so for what it is worth...


Let's go back to February 13. I'm visiting mum in hospital. She has less than two weeks left, though we didn't know that then. The catering staff come in with her evening meal: an omelette and mash, accompanied by some nuclear-fallout-coloured carrot and turnip cubes. Weird in itself. I’m not sure I’d put those together. They leave and mum, who’s been completely lucid and coherent throughout my hour-long visit till then, looks furtively from side to side and suddenly exclaims ‘Muslim men!’ I’m puzzled, given the guy who’s just delivered the food is almost a caricature of your bog-standard ethnic Scot of the gingerheid variety. ‘Muslim men know a thing or two about these matters!’ she elaborates, gesturing with her head towards her plate. I wonder if she’s trying to tell me she’d rather have a decent curry from the Village Curry house round the corner, than more hospital food.

‘About what?’ I ask, vaguely terrified of what she’s going to come out with!

‘Omelettes!’ is her rather unexpected reply. ‘I can see them out my window’ she explains. The photo above is of the view from her window that afternoon. ‘Can you see them down there?’ she asks. I can see nothing but rain and a rooftop carpark. She insists that I look all the way down the seven floors to the pavement below. She is insistent, so I play along. She needs me to see them – I don’t know if the brain tumours are causing her to see them or the high doses of morphine she’s taking for the brain tumours but I know there is no point in arguing, she needs me to confirm what she can see so I look down. ‘Oh, yeah,’ I say.

‘Do you know what they are doing down there, crouched on those little carpets?’ she asks. ‘Eh no?’ I reply, lost for words. They’re comparing their omelettes, swapping them, then passing them along the row so they are ordered perfectly, by size – from biggest to smallest, fluffiest to rubberiest. And once they are all in the right order, they bring them back inside and up here to us! Told you! Muslim men – they know exactly how to go about these things – clued up they are, well clever! They sure as hell know a thing or two, especially when it comes to omelettes!’

And then, as suddenly as the topic had been brought up, it disappeared again, and with a wink and a smile she sat happily in her bed, slightly in awe of and genuinely impressed by the prowess of the rows of Muslim men on their knees below her hospital room on that drizzly Glasgow winter Sunday.

I’ve no idea at all what inspired the story other than the rubber omelette handed to her by the catering staff. No notion why Muslim men were involved, but by agreeing to her story, she was so calm and happy that I could see them too. It’s truly fascinating how the human brain works. That afternoon, I had gone up to visit her alone, having flown in on the Friday night but Covid restrictions meant she was only allowed two visitors a day and Thomas had gone with Charlotte the day before. She’d been moaning constantly about the insipid hospital coffee that tasted of nothing, so I stopped on my way and bought her a caramel cappuccino to go from Costa. She was happy. Dying, and yet receiving a decent coffee seemed worth mentioning more than the news that she'd just been diagnosed with lung cancer that had spread to her spine, bones, liver, and brain just days before. 

I enjoyed my visit that day, in a bittersweet way because she was pain-free and at peace. I think age has helped my perspective. When my gran was dying of lung and brain cancer when I was 16, I found 'mad' stories of this type excruciatingly embarrassing but learning to lean into them and go with the flow was somehow calming. At 16, I remember desperately thinking, that I would prefer to die than come out with something mad and unreal. I wanted to leave this planet with my dignity intact, but at 54, I realised it no longer matters. My mum was happy that day. She appreciated that I could confirm her belief that Muslim men were to be admired for their skills in this department. I know mum loved a good curry so I guess she was probably just complimenting Muslim cuisine and it just came out a bit jumbled up. Nothing positive would have come from me contradicting this moment of confusion. Dying is also a part of living, it's just taken me this long to work that out.

And as an addendum to this story, it seems sweetly fitting that when we put mum's house up for sale after her death, the young family who moved in were 'the Islams'. It's nice to think of their two little girls growing up in the same house we did. I guess Muslim men know a bit about house hunting as well as about omelettes! And I expect there will be some excellent cooking coming out of her kitchen after many years of microwave meals from Aldi.


Tuesday, August 16, 2022

Windows or Mac?

I've been a bit remiss on the blogging front this last year. I guess between my boob problems and my mum dying suddenly things have just all been a bit too up in the air. But my other issue was more mundane - my computer. 

Over the last decade, I've bought three, if not four windows laptops, all of which have been hopeless. They start out fine but within six months are on a go-slow, taking up to half an hour to boot up. Thomas fixes them and the problem recurs within days. He's been telling me for a decade to get a MacBook - he's been using one for eight years, as has Marcel and neither have had any issues other than the battery. So, I finally gave in, figuring that even at Mac prices, one would cost less than four. It turned up last Monday night. I'm not used to Macs but I'm willing to learn a new set of workings as long as I have something that starts up nicely.

Tuesday morning, I tried Zoom for the first time while I sat chatting to my Danish language helper, Jens. He said the picture and audio coming from my end was much better than usual. Result!

Wednesday, I replied to a couple of emails and looked for a recipe to make plum tart. Again, I got in at lightning speed and all was well.

Thursday, I was busy with other things so didn't check it out.

Friday, I decided to upload all the photos I took when Derek and Amanda were here...

I opened it but it appeared to be out of charge. I plugged it in but no light appeared on the charger cable. We phoned Apple support. They went through a troubleshoot to no avail.

Yesterday, I drove it into town to the Apple specialist who has declared it dead as a dodo.

FFS! Even the Windows machines lasted more than three days! 

I guess I am sending it back now to be replaced but I'm now less than confident that I have found the laptop to take me through into the 2030s, after all.

Friday, June 17, 2022

Mad?

When I moved in with Thomas the first thing I noticed on his bookshelf was a book entitled 'God mad'. I thought that was a rather strange possession for a guy whose mum was a minister and whose dad was a theology professor. Whatever misgivings he had about his parents' religion, I thought this was a step further than expected. 

Of course, when I pulled it from the shelf and saw the cover, it became obvious that it was actually a cookbook, god being 'good' and mad being 'food'. I laughed at my own error.

Still the word mad amuses me today. There's a snackbar near here called 'Go' Mad' which makes my English native brain smile whenever I drive by and this car that passed me a few months ago also caused a mild chuckle. Childish I know, but still...




Saturday, June 11, 2022

A different kettle of fish

Since day one Nacho has been a fussy eater... in a good way. Nacho only eats dried cat biscuits. We offered him the expensive wet cat food samples the vet gave us on his first visit and he refused to try them. We tried salmon, prawns, cooked chicken, and raw mince and everything was sniffed and entirely rejected without the smallest crumb passing his lips. The only thing he seems to like that isn't cat biscuits is cheese. He doesn't even catch birds or mice because they aren't dry crunchy biscuits! I'm not sure he's fully read the manual on how to cat. We've long given up on trying to get him to taste anything other than dried biscuits.

So, last week Samosa came into our lives. Day one saw her refuse everything edible and even water. We ended up feeding her water on a teaspoon. We were worried, but shouldn't have been. Turns out it was nerves. Moving in with a new family apparently makes you a nervous wreck for precisely 18 hours, then you bite the bullet and decide you're willing to give wet cat food a go, followed by the biscuits, whiskas kitten milk, cheese, meat, fish, crisps, breakfast pancakes, and everything dropped on the floor including a strawberry. This is going to be a problem because we're used to leaving a snack on the coffee table knowing there's no chance Nacho will so much as smell it. Just imagine Léon's face last night when he left a plate of mash, IKEA meatballs, and meatball sauce on the desk in his room, only to come back from the loo and find a rather small girl sitting on the plate wolfing down more mash than he thought was humanly possible!



Meaningless questions with no answers

Yesterday, driving down to IKEA, Thomas and I were discussing how just 100 years ago the villages around where we live must have had every sort of shop imaginable, and therefore some people never really left the 10km radius around where they were born and yet today travel is so integrated in our psyche. I mentioned that my own grandmother never went further than Wolverhampton in her 68 years. She never went as far as where her granddaughter, and five of her great grandchildren live. She never even saw London. 

Growing up we were told stories of gran's stay in Wolverhampton, when her sister, Rita, was dying. The sweet story went that when my poor great aunt was diagnosed with cancer in her late 30s, my gran (her little sister) moved down to care for her and her 6 year old son, taking my 5 year old mum with her. Gran was 33 at the time. Mum started school in England, Gramps got a plumber job and gran cared for Rita. One day after six months, mum came home from school and nonchalantly greeted my very Glaswegian Gramps with 'ello love' in a very Brummie accent. Gramps promptly packed two cases and told gran no wean of his was growing up with a Brummie accent and took the train back to Glasgow telling her to follow home once the inevitable came to pass! Never again did my gran voyage further than Blackpool. 

I know they weren't the richest pair, but I am puzzled that they never went anywhere, they both worked after all and Gramps got a free house and van with his job. Gran told me at least once a month for the 16 years we overlapped that she had two dreams: to ride in a helicopter and to visit Switzerland. The Switzerland dream came up again and again. It suddenly struck me yesterday that I never once asked her 'Why Switzerland?' I mean: was it mountains? cows with big bells? cuckoo clocks? chocolate? I even went to Switzerland on a school trip two years before she died and brought her back a rather cheesy cuckoo clock and some chocolate but still she never told me why Switzerland and for some reason I never asked. I suddenly realised yesterday that the one person who might know is suddenly gone and now I'll never know. When death comes suddenly, you forget to ask the questions that don't really matter. 

Since February 26 there have only been two people left on this earth with the key to my childhood memories. I remember my mother-in-law saying that the day her mum died, her childhood was nowhere other than in her head, her only sibling having died before their mother, which is even worse I guess. Maybe when I'm gone, my kids will appreciate their army of siblings even more than they do now.

Here's a pic of my poor gran who never got to Switzerland.




Tuesday, June 07, 2022

Samosa Friday Buchanan-Widmann

At Easter we spent a night at Thomas's sister's house. That meant leaving Nacho in the house overnight alone. We weren't going to be there long enough to check him into his usual cat hotel, so left loads of food and water and toys, but still we felt guilty. Back when we got Nacho, we had had the option of taking his brother too. Amaia was really not sure about cats back then so we weren't sure two wouldn't be too much for a kid who was scared of animals. We should have known better. After a fortnight, Amaia had come round and regret was setting in. This overnight though made us realise how it would be easier going forward to leave him if he had a wee friend, or a sibling. The search began, scouring most of Denmark for kittens in need of rescuing or rehoming. We found a litter two hours away but they were too young to leave their mum so we've been getting updates for about six weeks now until last Saturday when we could finally bring her home.

We decided to name her Samosa - as it was another orangey-coloured triangular snack food like Nacho and she too had quite a lot of ginger in her. I have decided single-handedly that her middle name is Friday as she looks like the kind of cat who could only have been assembled last thing on a Friday - Orange legs, white feet, a half grey, half orange face, a long tail that doesn't fit with the rest, and better still it turns out she was born on a Friday! 

It's day three and they are already chasing each other in a non-agressive manner round the house and stealing each other's food, so things are looking positive. Hopefully there will be many updates on here going forward!













It's good to see things from another perspective

I considered not publishing this one. There are some things you don't talk about - like miscarriages, menopause, hysterectomies, and mastectomies but how would not publishing it help anyone in the same situation? I can tick all those boxes. So, for what it's worth, here goes...

I was never a particularly self-conscious person body-wise. Not that I had any sort of model figure as a young woman - I was a little too short, my boobs were always a bit too big but I was happy enough with the way I looked and thought nothing of baring all, be that on a dodgy beach in Greece or in a communal changing room. I remember having a rather animated conversation about an idea for a dictionary many years ago on the way out of a sauna on a business trip. Enthusiastically, my boss (an Italian woman) and I stood discussing our ideas, when I noticed people around us were giving us funny looks. I assumed it was because lexicography was not the most normal of topics, but I slowly realised it was probably because we were both completely naked in the middle of a large room, arms waving, and no one else was!

Obviously over the years I've had five babies, the biggest of which weighed in at 4.5kg, so things aren't quite how they were but again that was more a badge of honour than anything shameful, so I even managed to embrace that version of me and still wander about naked without too much thought.

However, I've been through my own personal war these past few years. My ovarian cancer scare of 2018 left me with a scar from my belly button to my pubic bone. Moreover, an infection I got post-op left me with a rougher edge to the top of that scar. I feared at the time that it might end up looking like 2 belly buttons, one under the other, but in the end, it wasn't quite that bad. I think it took me over a year to walk past my kids in my underwear after that one, and when I did, I'm not sure they even noticed I looked any different.

I had just about come to terms with that when I was hit with last year's boob bombshell. Some dodgy cells found in the milk ducts of my right boob meant all the breast tissue and the nipple had to be removed as a precaution. That left me with the option of one boob as an E cup and the other completely flat, or a more invasive reconstruction of the right to a size B, but a simultaneous reduction of the other to match. I'm not sure I was ready in my early 50s to become completely asexual-looking so opted for the more complex of the two operations, not so much because of how society wanted me to look, but because of how I could face myself. Surgical menopause in 2018, before my body was ready, had already done little for my sense of femininity or self-esteem, so I didn't need to lose my boob on top of the rest, especially before the first scar had even faded.

The upshot is that I look passable in clothes, which is good for my sense of self. No one needs to know what I have been through unless I want them to. But I wasn't ok on the underneath. I took to avoiding mirrors and locking the door to the bathroom. This was a far cry from a few years earlier when I routinely was joined in the bathroom when I was in the bath by some kid or another asking for homework help. I didn't want to see me and I didn't want anyone else to see me either, checkups with the consultant excepted, of course.

After about nine months, Amaia questioned why I was no longer as open as I used to be. At 12, she sees things differently to me I guess. I reminded her what I had been through, as I had kept them in the loop all along, but to my surprise she was completely unfazed. To her I am still me, so all I got was a shrug and a 'so what's the problem?' I told her it made me more self conscious than before and she asked why. I described how I look now - huge scars round half my body, nipples removed and again she said she didn't see why that would change my confidence levels. 'Sounds to me like you now have Barbie boobs!' she said nonchalantly, with a smile.

So, there you have it, two major operations down the line and apparently I now look like a Barbie doll! Well, maybe a wee bit less tall and slim, but still... Maybe it's time I opened up a bit and went back to being just me.