Vindicated!

I’d almost given up on this blog, complaining to Mr T that nothing in the Netherlands inspires me to put pen to paper.  Nothing funny ever happens here, I moaned. All the ex-pats friends we met when we first arrived, bar one, have already left or are all boxed up and ready to go; we have totally failed to integrate, our efforts to learn the language are abysmal and we haven’t made any Dutch friends. Blah, blah, blah. Poor Mr T. I hold him responsible for everything; the monotonous landscape, the dull, damp, windy weather, our erratic central heating system, even Albert Heijn’s failure to stock Ribena. It is all his fault.

Funny how a few days of sunshine can change things. Spring has sprung, the tulips are out, and finally….after 18 months of regular attendance we have finally won the pub quiz! 

Suddenly it doesn’t seem such a bad place to live. We have had a string of visitors from the UK. We have strolled around Keukenhof gardens admiring the blooms in our T-shirts, we have sampled our first Dutch ice-creams of the year. We’ve got back on our bikes. I can almost feel that layer of blubber I acquired over the winter dropping off – I might even buy a new battery for the bathroom scales to test my theory out (or maybe not - ignorance is always bliss).

New friends I made to replace the old ones who left are proving a lot of fun.  I never thought I’d be a natural at flower arranging, but after a couple of glasses of wine, who knew? I am not a natural shopper, but suddenly, one pair of new pumps or two? Doesn’t seem such a bad idea.

I’ve got a diary that is full. I have to block out days to continue with novel number two whilst I dither over my dilemma of whether to accept a deal to hybrid publish, or just self-publish, or continue to wait in vain for that mega-million advance for novel number one.

Even the cat has taken on a whole new persona. He is out on the tiles all night and sleeping in the closet all day. I hardly see him.

But the high-light of the last few weeks has to be that pub quiz win. Despite the fact that the two Dutch team-mates who joined us for the night failed to answer the question which Dutch city was destroyed by a great fire in 1504 (duh, it was Haarlem…) we won by just one point.

After all those evenings of just making the numbers up, I felt vindicated.

And when I've bought too many pairs of new shoes, this is what I will do with them!