It's all (a bit more than) double Dutch to me

The old year is drawing to a close with an unexpected flurry of socialising, which is a bit uncharacteristic for a grumpy old man like me. Yesterday my former colleague at the National Disability Insurance Agency, Ray Jeffrey dropped in to say hello.  He's a Gilmore resident like us but has been based in Brisbane since August to help prepare the ground for the roll out of the NDIS in Queensland from mid-2016.

Shortly after Ray departed our visitors from The Netherlands arrived to stay the night.  I've not seen Klary Van Keulen since 1974 or maybe (at a push) 1975 when I was 17 or 18 years old.  That'll be forty years ago.

Dib, dib, dib ...

We met for the first time in 1973 at the international Scouts Chalet in Kandersteg, Switzerland.  I was there with the 24th Glasgow (Bearsden) Scout Troop on what was my second visit to the Bernese Oberland. Klary was a member of a Dutch Scout Troop which, much to our adolescent Scottish boys' delight, included girls as well as boys.  That would be enough of a reason to be friendly as far as we were concerened but there were all kinds of other attractions, not least their smoking habits - Drum and Samson loose leaf tobacco extracted from bright blue pouches to roll into cigarette using just one hand!  How cool might that be to a teenage boy from Glasgow still wet behind the ears? Forty years on, none of us smokes.

The year after we met I took trains around Europe using the InterRail Pass ticket system which, at that time, allowed you unrestricted train travel in 17 countries or thereabouts for a month for a ridiculously low price. (The same pass today, covering about twice the number of countries, costs a bit under 800 Euro.  Is that still a bargain?  No idea.)  Not that it matters to anyone but me, but the fact my InterRail trip was my second time meeting Klary - this time in Enschede and Hengelo in The Netherlands - means I would shortly go to university which means I'd left the Royal Bank of Scotland (my first job after leaving school) which means I was 17 when we met in Switzerland, so - 1974 - forty years ago.  But I digress.

Klary, her husband Gerrit, Klary's sister Nettie (who I also met in 1974), Nettie's daughter Diana, Klary's daughter Margriet and her fiance, an Australian soldier named Clint arrived ysterday evening.  We talked, ate food, drank wine and beer, retired to bed then started the eating and talking again this morning over breakfast.  And then our Dutch friends left for Sydney where Margriet and Clint will be married on the 9th January.  By ten to five in the afternoon the tourists were posting photos of themselves on the beach at Wollongong having lunched with Clint's family in Campbelltown.  
 
An hour after Klary and her unambiguously Dutch entourage left Gilmore we were visited by a school friend of Spike, Stephanie with her husband Nick and boys Ruben and Fraser.  Outside of a school reunion earlier this year Spike and Stephanie had not seen one another for about 15 years.  It all makes me wonder, where does the time go?  But we both owe it to Facebook for re-connecting us to people we've not seen for years; decades in my case.  It's too easy to have a go at Facebook but you can't really argue with this re-uniting potential that it carries for all of us. Or is that simply an observation for old fogeys like me? Probably but what can a man do?  An old fogey is an old fogey.  Need proof ...?  While Stephanie and Spike were chatting Ruben, Stephanie's six year old eldest son, wupped this old man's ass at noughts and crosses on the youngster's iPhone.

Tragic old man.  But a happy old man who's had a lovely twenty four hours with friends old and new.