Authors Electric

  I love listing to music when working in my kitchen. The music has to match my mood, so yesterday, I decided to pop a cd in that a friend in Ukraine gave us. They’re Russian hymns. My religious knowledge of Russian doesn’t go anywhere beyond the words for Heaven and Jesus. Not very helpful to understand songs, you might think, but I just love listening to them. I even have favourites, with one of them moving me every time I listen to it. Without knowing what it’s about... What kind of listener or reader are you? Do you need to understand it all to be moved by words? My husband does not like listening to songs in other languages. “I have no idea what it’s about, and the songs all sound the same,” he says. Maybe it’s because I used to read my brother’s books when I was little. I’m pretty sure that I didn’t understand those books, but it never spoilt my reading fun. I remember my first book in English, Anne of Green Gables. I was eleven, and I started by looking up all the unknow...

I love travelling. Especially if the place I’m going to is different from where I grew up. The views across forested hills, the sight of some bird of prey gliding in the air, the sound of huge waves crashing on a beach... I recently discovered a wonderful website that shares Live travel with the world. You simply choose the tour you want at a time that you can attend, get yourself a drink and sit back whilst the tour guide shows you around. It’s free (tip enabled) which to someone Dutch is remarkable in itself, as we have a saying, “Only the sun comes up for free.” There are too many tours to choose from, and some of them are at ridiculous times, but the ones I look for are the ones that include stories, legends, information. I’m not keen on guided tours, as my attention span is normally only a fraction of the guide’s, so by the time we have left the first exhibition room in some castle, the guide is just warming up, and I want to get to the next room already. On the Virtual travel sit...

Every winter in the Netherlands there is a chance of an Elfstedentocht (Eleven city tour). It’s an ice-skating tour that passes eleven cities in Friesland, in the north of the Netherlands. It’s about 200 km long, and can only be done when it’s very, very cold. Not just your average frost, when people flock to the canals and town ponds to skate around for a while. No, it has to be a prolonged hard frost, for the ice has to have a certain depth and hardness to it. Believe it or not, an Elfstedentocht is very popular, so tonnes of people will want to take part. Fancy getting up in the middle of the night to make a five o’clock start with temperatures of about -20C? The last one was in 1997, and I remember sitting in the neighbour’s living room watching it. The king, then crown prince, even took part, in disguise. It’s gruelling, and frostbite is a real danger. It’s a race or a tour, depending on what you sign up for, but either way, to get to the end is incredible. The whole country watch...