First off, my gallery of the wedding of liberaliser and Mrs liberaliser. The first three pics are from the civil ceremony on 4 July; then the rest from the religious ceremony on 11 July, six from the church, and seven from the reception, of which I admit that only two are of the happy couple themselves, five of our son and/or his second cousin, and one of artw's cousin and her partner who were at our table. It was a great day, and we also have videos (not totally audible) of the speeches.

Next up, F's birthday, which began on Friday with the usual examination of the spoils:



Followed by a party yesterday at which his baffled young Flemish friends were introduced to the star attraction:



F was determined that his party should have an Ancient Egyptian theme, though was concerned that this might not be totally consistent with Daleks. Luckily I was able to put him right. So we have the Walking Like An Egyptian game, the provision of dates and figs, and the pyramid-shaped birthday cake.



Great fun was had by all.

Happy birthday, my love! Wish I was there with you!

F was given some frogspawn to care for from school just before Easter, and the tadpoles graduated from the small plastic container they arrived in, to a bucket in his room. F has been very responsible about feeding them; I felt very uneasy though about having dozens of God's creatures living under our roof, without the prospect of ultimate liberty.

But my doubts have been happily confounded. artw took us all to the local pond shop on Sunday, and bought some pondweed and a bonus pond snail. The pond shop itself was pretty amazing, a suburban labyrinth of water features (mostly inhabited by fish, amphibians and other invertebrates). Now, the big plastic turtle which we originally bought as a sandpit for B nine years ago, and which has since done occasional duty as a paddling pool, has become a new home for the tadpoles, sitting in the drive just outside the garden gates in order to prevent U from experimenting with the water. It has a couple of shelves that its inhabitants can sit on when their legs have grown, and has already started attracting insects. Summer is coming, and it is beautiful.

It is six months today since B moved out; we were told yesterday that she is now at the point where they will move her from her current accommodation, an hour's drive from us near the Dutch border, to the much closer residential centre where she stayed for respite a couple of times during the summer. She seems in reasonable form at the moment (which of course is why they are now talking about moving her); she had had a very unhappy patch a few months ago, but has returned to a more even keel.

For the rest of us, it has been six months of adjustment to a new family situation, tough occasionally but generally an improvement: far fewer messes to clear up, no constant vigilance on the bathroom and kitchen, much greater freedom for us to go on family outings (most often, of course, to see B up in Limburg). Sounds like she will move in the middle of next month, if the everything is right, and then we will be able to see her more flexibly: maybe even bring her back home for the occasional heavily supervised curry. It's all a process of adaptation...

Went to see B this morning: here is a rare picture of the five of us out for a walk (taken by the children's Granny!)

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F has been making things that he got for Christmas.

( Who kit )

( Shark Run roller coaster )

A pleasant weekend is being had by all!

...but what is in that large green box at the left hand corner????

( all is revealed )

We spent Christmas 1997 in Banja Luka, Bosnia, with six-month-old B and my mother. B at that stage had all the normal developmental signs, was just sitting up, smiling like anything, and weathered with resilience an attack of impetigo on her neck.



Banja Luka, on the other hand, was a city still in trauma, barely a year after the end of the war, and still worrying if it would start again; the local politicians who I was working with were locked in an internal power struggle with the war-time hard-line Serb leadership, and the political situation was still fragile. None the less I managed to buy a Christmas tree at a stall in the main street.



We used to go to Mass on Sundays at the Metal Factory outside the city, the main base for the British army in the area. On Christmas Eve they had a Midnight Mass, actually at midnight, jointly celebrated by the Catholic and Anglican chaplains (the latter was in fact from Northern Ireland, so CoI rather than CoE). We all went, carrying sleeping B with us. Rather than the usual dozen or so in the congregation, the little metal hut was packed with servicemen and servicewomen, singing Christmas carols lustily and all clearly missing home desperately. Though civilians, we got special attention for having a baby with us.

The next day was Christmas Day itself, though not for the local Orthodox Serbs who stick to the old calendar. I went down to the covered market to buy a turkey, but found my Serbian was not up to it, so found a local friend to help me negotiate.



She did the job, and I went home with a fine bird, though with all innards intact, which my mother bravely prepared and roasted. We settled down to Christmas dinner and remarked on how much fat there was in the skin of Bosnian turkeys. And, yeah, the liver had been a lot bigger than you would expect too. And it tasted different from turkeys we were used to. In fact, it tasted more like, em, a goose. We concluded that it was a goose, not a turkey. No big deal, just not quite what I thought I had brought home. We had a good day anyway, and B enjoyed her presents.



I took it up with my local friend the next day. "Did you realise," I asked her, "that that bird we got yesterday was a goose - guska/гуска - not a turkey - ćurka/ћурка?" She shrugged her shoulders without embarrassment. "What do I know about that?" she demanded. "I am city girl." She gave the impression that to know such technicalities of bird genus was the mark of an inferior rural upbringing, far beneath the notice of an urban sophisticate like her.

All in all it was a special Christmas - our first with B, as now we are having our first without her.

Three blogs that you all should be reading:

scattyme plasters the ceiling.

Alex Wilcock is torn between the two Lib Dem leadership candidates.

President Ahmedinejad of Iran.

We went and saw B today en famille, and spent about an hour with her in the snoezelruimte at the centre where she is living - not quite as elaborate as the one we used to go to at Tielt-Winge, but none the less very acceptable. She was delighted to see us, and F delighted to see her; U took a bit more convincing that this was a good idea, but had mellowed out by the end. It was really good to see all three children being happy in the same room, with F valiantly doing his best to interact with his sisters. We may even try the excursion again.

We've done quite well for family expeditions since she moved out. Last week we went to the annual exhibition of small cuddly animals in our village (see also our visit in 2005); ( pictures )

The weekend before we went to Technopolis, the educational science centre in Mechelen to the north of Brussels. Lots of exciting wheels to turn and buttons to push; the highlight is the child's encounter with their own little Van de Graaff generator, a quite literally ( hair-raising experience )

Well, the children's uncle has just arrived to celebrate his 30th birthday, so I shall go and be sociable.

We got F out of bed last night to watch Time Crash (we're an hour ahead of you guys in Ireland and UK-land, so it wasn't on until twenty past nine, way past his usual bed-time even on a Friday). He loved every minute of it, though some of the jokes were a bit above his head. And this morning we sat down and watched the Doctor Who Confidential (which consists entirely of fannish squeeing from Collinson, Davies, Moffat, Harper, Davison and Tennant). And then we watched The Runaway Bride. And we finished off with a few scenes from episode one of Castrovalva, so that he could see what the Fifth Doctor looked like first time round. And then after a break we watched both episodes of Revenge of the Slitheen.

F has only really got into Whodom in the last few months. He was aware of it as something his parents watched after his Saturday bedtime, but then his cousin J raced through our DVDs of the 2005 and 2006 seasons while we were staying with them in July, and then the Sarah Jane Adventures began and he is now completely hooked. Now it is again past his bedtime, but he is spontaneously redesigning my filing system for my Tenth Doctor episodes. Excellent.

Many of you reading this will know about our family situation. Those of you who aren't on my livejournal friends list, or who I haven't seen in person recently, may not know about the latest developments. Since things seem to be fairly certain now, this is a general public update on what has been happening and what will happen next.

Our daughter B has a very serious autistic learning disability. Having developed relatively normally for her first two years, she then lost the ability to talk, and many other facets of normal development, in the following six months. The reason we live way out here in the wilds of Flemish Brabant is that we found the best school for her to be Ter Bank near Leuven. Not only did B enjoy it, but when her little sister U turned out to have similar problems, she started attending the school as well, and still goes there.

Towards the end of last year, however, B's behaviour had got too much for the school to cope with, and it clearly wasn't doing her much good; so we moved her to another wonderful day-care centre, 't Prieeltje in Tienen, about a half hour's drive east of here. She loved it there at first - indeed, you can see her on their web page at present, one of the pictures is of her clearly having a ball - but last June, just before her tenth birthday, she suddenly rebelled, by refusing to get into the car, which meant she could no longer be transported back and forth from here to there.

Since then she has been at home, and my heroic mother-in-law has been helping us out ever since, as B's behaviour has been very difficult. To cut quite a long story short, we have been negotiating with the various potential care options; and they have now come up with a solution for us. On Monday, B will move to the St Oda institute in Overpelt, about an hour's drive away from us; they specialise in monitoring and treating children with very serious behavioural problems, which is the category B clearly fits into. She will stay there for a few months, and will then transfer to the to a closer facility as her permanent (or at least long-term) home.

We know it already, as they had been on the horizon as a long-term care option for a while, and like the quality of the care that they offer, though again that leaves out significant chunks of the story. Indeed, B has already been there a couple of times, and they told us today that they can take her from tomorrow until Sunday for respite care. That means that tonight is the second last night she will be at home, and Sunday will be the last. We are relieved, but also sad.

You can never tell what is in the package. When B was born, we certainly never anticipated that she would leave our household a few months after her tenth birthday. Even until last year, I certainly thought we would probably have her with us until her early teens. But of course, there are other families who are less fortunate than us; whereas our daughter, F and U's sister, will only be a few minutes' drive away even after she has moved out, there are others who are separated from their children by eternity.

My aunt and uncle on the early days of Bangladesh.

Second week of school is always bug week, and both F and U went down with colds on Wednesday, which was also the day I went to London for two days of work meetings - thanks very much to clanwilliam and gmh for your hospitality!

By the time I was on Eurostar on Friday evening my throat was feeling pretty raw as well, and I got home to find Anne in pretty much the same state. And yesterday B (who returned home a week ago) started the morning by gently puking upstairs. By the late afternoon U was in misery, and her temperature had soared to 40.8 (105.8 in your antiquated counting) so we called the doctor, who prescribed antibiotics and suggested we take her to hospital for a lung X-ray if she hadn't improved by today. (F has recovered fully.)

However; things have improved. I cooked a large chicken curry last night, and B, despite her earlier stomach complaints, dug into it gleefully, with no apparent ill effects (indeed, if anything, the reverse). That cheered me up as well; communicating with B is not easy and I feel that cooking her food she enjoys is one of the special things I can do for her. And by the end of the evening, U had also perked up, helping us watch classic music videos off YouTube; this one sent her into peals of laughter. Which is reassuring, at least on most levels.

My throat is still sore but improving. Why is it these bugs usually hit you at the weekend?

Young F's school had the annual schoolfeest yesterday, with his class portraying incidents from the travels of Pippi Longstocking. In the video below you will see F (in the light green poncho) and three of his classmates being members of a South American tribe who Pippi encounters. Note the large artificial treetrunk, which is there not as a representation of the rain forest but as a pun (the word stam meaning both tribe and trunk). Note also that toward the end you will see two girls playing different aspects of Pippi, one with her own hair and the other with a wig.


(Delighted to find that my new camera does sound as well as movies.)

Afterwards there was face-painting.

My son F's portrayal of the "10th Docter or Docter for the 3rd season":

( picture )

...to wwhyte and Steph on their new arrival! And rather thrilling to hear her little voice down the phone just now.

(And I must say it's nice to have a niece. I have an eight-year-old nephew on the other side of the family, but until today no nieces.)

2) Field of Bones: An Irish Division in Gallipoli, by Philip Orr

A few years ago I posted a letter from my grandfather written from Palestine in January 1918, during the first world war, and over the last year or so I've been trying to get a better picture of his experiences at the end on 1915 and in 1916 with the 6th Royal Dublin Fusiliers as part of the 10th Division in Macedonia. For some reason I had not especially got into the Gallipoli side of his military career, despite the explicit reference to "9^th August" in the 1918 letter. But I spotted this book in a Belfast book shop when I was there last month, and discovered to my delight that it actually contained two references to my grandfather - one at the end to his death in 1949, but also another to his being wounded on 15 August 1915, during the British attempts to push east on the seaward side of the ridge north of Suvla Bay. This is practically the first reference I have found about him outside existing family lore. It seems that one of his friends left a fairly detailed account of the war, now in the National Army Museum archives in Chelsea.

Apart from my personal interest, I think this is a pretty good effort. Orr has very much gone for the soldier's-eye-view of the Suvla Bay campaign (with a minor excursion to follow the Irish soldiers detached to support the Anzacs further south).Of course, it seems that in this case the geopolitical or wider strategic aspects of the campaign would not make a lot of sense; he is deliberately concentrating on the experience of the 10th (Irish) Division, not the Allied forces as a whole. Also his source material is vivid stuff and he has put it together well. I think my biggest criticism is that he does not make as much as he could of the military failure of the campaign: the total failure of the landing to achieve any of its objectives, ie holding the high ground around the bowl-like bay from which the Turks eventually shelled them out, linking up effectively with the Anzacs a few miles to the south, let alone pushing up the peninsula to Istanbul over 200 km away.

Orr also reflects on the way in which the Suvla Bay campaign has been ignored by later Irish historians, in total contrast to the nation-forging effect of the Anzac landings on the people on the far side of the world. He credits Shane McGowan of the Pogues for doing more than anyone else to raise public awareness of it in the most recent period. The problem was that the 10th Division was too broad-based in its membership; within a year of its landing at Gallipoli, more exclusive military myths had been generated by each side much closer to home (the Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme). And while there have certainly been greater efforts made of late by the Irish state to recognise the Irish contribution to the first world war, it has tended to concentrate on the Western Front rather than events further east. This readable book will help to redress the balance. And I now know the true identity of the Stuffer.

Much drama this morning. B. managed to get hold of a freshly bought bottle of photographical chemicals, and was found by my sister beaming with pride at having removed the lid and bitten through the foil top.

The bottle was covered with stickers saying 'if ingested seek medical advice immediately' in umpteen languages, so I called 101 for emergency services and ended up getting both police (who I hadn't asked for, but who may have been having a boring Sunday morning and in need of some excitement) and an ambulance.

B., who like many autistic people generally prefers her own company, took it all in her stride and greeted each new set of uniformed visitors with a big smile. She was of course unable to tell us how much of the chemical she had swigged, so it was off to the hospital we went, B. clearly somewhat thrilled by the ambulance ride.

Once there, the nice folks in casualty had a look at her and determined that the chemical in question was largely citric acid, so heavily concentrated that it has a pH of 1; if B. had had enough to do her any harm, she would not have been in such a sunny mood. So we went home relieved.

My sister had bought the stuff for her husband's photographic studio. He is colour-blind, so works only in black and white photography. Apparently the equivalent chemical in the process of developing colour photographs is much nastier. One should be thankful for small mercies.
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In pictures:

I was pleased with the Christmas dinner: a starter of Georgian mint and cheese, followed by snails, and then the boar main course with a Georgian bean stew, Belgian endives and a rice preparation of my own devising.

Unfortunately something in the food disagreed with my poor wife who has spent most of the afternoon and evening horizontal (and I won't describe where she has spent the rest of that time). Still, in between seeing to her needs, we were able to watch and enjoy Doctor Who. More on that later, and elsewhere.

My first day off work since I finished at the old job has been a tiring one.

U is four today. She may not be hugely conscious of the day's significance, but she will have a good time.

She was born exactly ninety years after Claudia "Lady Bird" Johnson, who is 94 today.

(And it is the 58th birthday of both Noel Edmonds and Patricia Hewitt, who were born exactly two years before the Bee Gees. And the anniversary of the deaths of Admiral Dönitz in 1980 and Samuel Beckett in 1989.)

B has taken to removing the duvet from our bed, swaddling herself in it, and falling asleep in front of the front door. She can't tell us what the attraction is; perhaps she likes the cool air coming in through the doorframe. Anyway, normally it is easy enough to persuade her to go upstairs to her room when we want to reclaim the duvet for our own use. But this evening I realised another potential pitfall - if she's already lying in front of the door when I get back from work, it is very difficult for me to open it and gain access to my own home...

Spent much time yesterday looking around two day-centres for children with learning disabilities. B is finding school too much for her, won't participate in group activities and comes home bruised from banging herself against walls in frustration. I thought they were both nice places; one only a few km away, but I thought its facilities marginally inferior (apart from the garden) and anyway they don't have any vacancies; the other about 20 km east of here, with a nicer interior atmosphere but not as much outside space (oddly enough, within spitting distance of the church of Our Lady of the Stone where the local saint consoles those with mental disorders). The second place does have a vacancy, so if we take them up on it, poor artw will get to know the motorway between here and there rather well as their bus service doesn't run this far west.

I spoke more Dutch yesterday than I do in the average month (also when I finally got into work had to go straight out again for a meeting with a Dutch MEP) and was musing on one or two words or phrases which are particularly pleasing in that language. We were asked at both daycentres to give them our gegevens. The word gegeven is the past participle of the verb geven, "to give"; but in English you don't ask people for their "givens", you resort to Latin where the verb "to give" is do, dare, dedi, datum and the plural of datum is "data". Wouldn't it be nicer to talk of "givens" than "data"? Also there was much discussion of the prikkels which would be experienced by our daughter at each place. Although the word is pronounced identically to the English word "prickles", in Dutch it has a wider range of meanings, including in this particular case the concept conveyed by the English word "stimuli", which of course comes from Latin stimulus, meaning "goad", the diminutive of stilus meaning "stick". On the one hand, the English language has been enriched (as james_nicoll has famously pointed out) by its use of vocabulary from many sources. On the other, it does mean that we can lose touch rather easily with the resonances of what words actually meant originally.

Also after almost eight years here I am still getting used to Flemish rather than Dutch. The use of ge rather than U or jij to mean "you" still throws me - when I learnt Dutch a quarter of a century ago we used gij and ge only to address God. Not so different, of couse, from the use of "thou" in rural Yorkshire, but I have never spent much time in rural Yorkshire. Also I noticed, more than previously, people not pronouncing the letter "h" at the start of a word - is this a general Flemish thing, or something more restricted to areas within spitting distance of the taalgrens? And of course the diminutive form of nouns being -ske or -ke rather then -tje or -je. I wonder what else I miss because people are trying to speak clearly to us foreigners, rather than talking as they normally would?

I think I'm getting to grips with this insertion of maps business...

Growing up in Northern Ireland I was very very interested in astronomy, and the Planetarium in Armagh was a regular treat for me (and perhaps also the rest of the family). My father even cited my interest in one of his papers ("The Permeability of the United Kingdom-Irish Border: A Preliminary Reconnaissance", published in 1982). At the age of 16 I achieved my first serious hack points outside the immediate educational environment when I served for two years as secretary of the Irish Astronomical Association (from 1983 to 1985). I actually wanted to be an astronomer when I grew up, until I spent the summer of 1988 at the Royal Greenwich Observatory (then in its last few months at Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex) and realised that this was not the life for me.

So there was an element of risk in bringing the family to Armagh; would the source of my youthful idealism stand up to mature re-examination? The Planetarium, I knew, had been completely renovated over the last few years and only re-opened last month.

But in fact I need not have worried. This may be local pride, but I think it is still a better and more engaging exhibition than the planetarium in Brussels (which I visited with F a few months back, and he wasn't awfully impressed). As well as the standard space memorabilia there is a neat 3-D view of Martian cliffs, and two short 3-D films which I'll have to go and see next time. There was even something for U - a big strip of lights going to the ceiling representing the different layers of the atmosphere, which she was able to turn on and off using switches which were just about at three-year-old level.

The main show in the dome has been completely changed, and for the better, by putting all the chairs facing the same way, and projecting the images from the walls to the dome rather than (as in the old days, and as in most planetariums still) having the audience sitting in circles around the big projector in the middle, mostly having to crane their necks to see parts of the show. The main show was pretty good, and I think well adjusted for people of F's age (seven) and above.

They prefaced the main show with a brief historical look at the Planetarium, presumably in part to help justify the taxpayers' money spent on the refurbishment. As a former activist, I was very intereted to see what had been put in and what left out. Rightly, tribute was paid to the vision of the astronomer who had set it up; rightly, the brief tenure of a famous TV astronomer as director-designate (he resigned before it was opened in 1966) was not mentioned; and also, warm tribute was paid to a subsequent director, whose tenure had not (as I remembered) always been easy. (Though I noticed that he had also in fact written and produced the main show.)

We then went outside to explore the scale model of the solar system (though of course you can do that at home) and checked out the Observatory (founded in 1790) at the top of the hill. Here too there was nostalgia (I worked there in the winter of 1985-86, showing people Halley's Comet through the Grubb telescope) and innovation - a "human orrery" exhibit showing you how to pace out the paths of the planets inside Saturn's orbit, plus also Halley's and Encke's Comets, and Ceres the largest asteroid. Again, U enjoyed this one too and decided to follow the nice circular paths.

So, jolly good fun, and a risk worth taking. We'll go back next year.

The Newry Canal is the oldest in the British Isles, having been opened in 1742. We had a brief stroll at Scarva after lunch on Sunday with children and visitors, enjoying landscape and wildlife.


(trying out the new client software; not totally satisfied but it's worth exploring further)

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