I don’t remember what exactly caused this error message, but it’s one of the silliest I’ve ever seen:

From the tiny knife and fork icon, it’s probably from a restaurant site, and from the Dutch-language “close” button I infer it was a Dutch restaurant site because all of my KDE is in English. Probably when I was looking for the Greek restaurant in Haarlem I wrote about a while ago.

The first meet of the Points Tournament in 2005 was in ‘t Harde, a little town that used to be one of the big garrison towns of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces when we still had conscription. We have a professional army now (it’s a normal job that people actually choose to do, you’re not thrown into it if you happen to be male, healthy and in your late teens) and that means there’s much less of it.

Even a flourishing army brings its own particular brand of desolation, and this was already evident on the station.

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This morning, taking the kids to school (well, they can go to school by themselves, I just go along for company), I found myself singing the troparion of Theophany.

At Your baptism in the Jordan, O Lord, worship of the Trinity was revealed, for the Father’s voice bore witness to You, calling You His “beloved Son”, and the Spirit in the form of a dove confirmed the truth of these words. O Christ God, Who appeared and enlightened the world, glory be to You!

“What tone is that?” my daughter asked. “The first,” I said, “do re mi, do re mi fa. I don’t know why I’m singing that in particular.” Which was true at that moment: even old-calendar Theophany was the day before yesterday, and ours was almost two weeks ago.

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After the Theophany, the Christmas tree has to go. We planted one in the garden a few years ago; it came to the then eight-year-old’s shoulder, and it’s now inches taller than the same kid at almost eleven. We don’t have a garden large enough to cope with two, let alone a whole stand of, former Christmas trees.

The municipal garbage-collecting people collect them every year, so that’s no problem, but I spotted discarded trees in the town centre before the Theophany and that worried me a bit. So I looked up the official city website; nothing about Christmas-tree collection. What’s the garbage-collecting outfit called again? Circulus. It figures, it rings a whole peal of bells of recycling, but it’s yet another of those fashionable names for institutions that don’t tell you what it is. “Thuiszorg” (“home care”) is now Carinova — and I had to look that up because it’s not something you remember.

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We were in Haarlem, having seen the Pieter Claesz exhibition and bought a few kilos of books at De Slegte, and getting hungry. We’d planned to go and eat at Ma Brown’s Restaurant —proper English cooking— and dressed up for it, but it was closed. It’s always closed when we want to eat there, most of the time because it’s Tuesday. This happened to be a Wednesday, but they were closed between Christmas and the New Year, “we’ll welcome you back on January 5th”.

Sorry, Ma Brown, we’re hungry now, we can hardly wait until January 5th! They seem to be closed during all school holidays, and that Boudewijn and Naomi managed to eat there in the autumn holidays is probably because the west of the country has a different holiday schedule from the east.

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