London Calling

My father in law remembers that well. As a young man in 1940, barely 13 years old, he was involved in some way in the Danish resistance of the nazi occupation. I know that he was one of the pamphlet distributors spreading the news of the resistance in Copenhagen and the surrounding area, and was involved with the printing of these pamphlets. He was there at the surrender of the German forces and saw Montgomery drive through the streets. He is proud that his son in law is a Brit. He thinks highly of the British. Without them, he says, we would all be speaking german now. The BBC was an inspiration then, and “London Calling” was a lifeline for those brave men, giving them information on supplies of weapons, explosives and operational instructions.
He celebrated his 80th birthday last week. What do you give a man that has everything he could need? Gifts are pointless, though gratefully recieved, but socks and so on don’t really cut the mustard for me. My wife had the idea. Take him to London. He has never been to Britain. It will be the trip of his life. So that’s what I’m going to do. We leave tomorrow at 12:45. By 15:00 he”ll be in central London, in a pub, with a pint of best British bitter in one hand and a bag of fish and chips in the other.

If I know him well enough, I’m in for a busy weekend. He is as fit as a fiddle and damn curious. I’m sure we will have to take the tour bus round London and stop at just about everything to look.

I think we’re both looking forward to it. More here, when we get back.

Heart Stopper

I got one of those phone calls yesterday. You know the ones I mean. Someone rings you up out of the blue and gives you the news that you never wanted to hear. And on hearing it, you feel the world close in around you and everything else gets blacked out for a few seconds.

“Hi “exile”, it’s (my daughter’s mother, the ex.) It’s about our daughter, she was hit by a car today….”

At that point, you don’t hear much else. The world goes into slow-mo and you can’t breathe. Your heart literally stops. At least, mine did.

It turns out, she is going to be OK. Her bike is a crumpled heap and she took a trip over the bonnet of the car, landing on the asphalt beside it. Bruised, but thankfully not broken, she is going to be OK.

There must be a little bit of me in her somewhere. I spoke to her on the phone today. “I’m OK dad”, she said, “just a bit sore down my side and a bit bruised. I reckon I got off lightly. I have to take it easy for a couple of days but I’m OK.” She even managed a laugh on the phone. Brave girl. She laughed, I cried.
She shrugged it off. I nearly collapsed in fear for her life.

Strange what fatherhood can do to you.

Bite Me!

I have few natural enemies. This is because I live in a country where there are no major predators or poisonous animals that can harm me. I don’t need to worry about being eaten by lions or tigers or the like, and you don’t see many large wild animals roaming the streets of Copenhagen these days. I am not likely to be attacked by some hungry animal. Or am I?

Hungry animals come in all shapes and sizes. One I have a great deal of dislike for is a vampirical animal which is hard to spot and even harder to avoid. The mosquito. The veritable blood sucking demon curse of our time. They love me. If you put me on a desert island in the middle of a vast ocean, some mozzie from a far away country will put its nose into the wind and catch my scent somehow. It will then fly half way around the world to come and bite me. It will fly past everybody else. It is me it is interested in biting. I am the number one favourite food for all the mosquitoes of the world. No one is as tasty as I, as far as mosquitoes are concerned. If I ever met the genie with the three wishes, the first wish would be that all the mosquitoes in the world had never been born or even existed. That is how much I hate them. They plague me. I am bitten on a regular basis, and it isn’t just the itching that gets me. It’s the swelling up of the bitten appendage. I have a real bad reaction to being bitten by mosquitoes.

Right now I am suffering from a mosqito bite on my right buttock. Yes, laugh if you will, my wife thinks it’s funny too. Not only does it itch, it is badly enflamed and swollen and just sitting down is, frankly, uncomfortable. The damn mozzie got me last night while I was asleep. I must have kicked off the duvet and bared my behind for the little blood sucking creature. The result really is a pain in the ass. I asked my dear wife to suck out the poison but for some strange reason, she declined. I told her that I would gladly bite her in the butt and suck like a leech if she so asked but that didn’t really have any effect on her, nor did it change her stance on the matter.

Luckily we don’t have to worry about malaria here, or other insect borne diseases that are spread by the female mosquito, for it is she that bites. Male mosquitoes live off plant juice. Females, on the other hand, will just suck the blood out of you.

What Makes it “Personal”?

My father always told me, that if anyone asked me about his business, I was to tell them that I didn’t know. Be polite, he said, but tell them you simply don’t know. What he did, where he went, was his personal business. Looking back, I can see why.

There are some things that should be kept strictly private. Only you should know them. Or, only you and those that you really trust. Like your last will and testament and your lawyer. Or if you are surreptitiously looking for a new job. Or saving a bit of money to surprise someone dear with. Where you go and what you do must, to a certain degree, be private and not for the common masses.

I have few secrets where my wife is concerned. She is the best personal advisor I have ever had. She looks beyond the immediate and thinks in terms that I wouldn’t dream of. I may be a schemer, but she is a master planner.

I have a couple of projects going right now. One of them is very private. One not. The first could cause me some grief if it was made public. I need to get a deal done first. If it falls through, then no one knows I tried it and no harm done. If it goes public now, then it could be damaging, expensive and embarrassing. The other is a question of my whereabouts on a certain day. That is a bit public and I don’t care if people see me there, when it happens. I will be making a stand for all to see.

I blog. Anonymously. That keeps it personal. Few people will know my real identity just by reading my blog. A few know because I have told them. And I trust them with it. If someone exposes me where I do not wish to be exposed, then I will have to start again. That is the risk one takes when one goes public with one’s ideas.

Not everyone is allowed to know my business. There are some things that I like to keep hidden from public view. My father was right. There are some things that are yours and yours alone. So if someone tells you something in confidence, keep it that way. And if anyone asks you about somebody else’s business, tell them you don’t know.

It’s personal.