This seemed a completely useless traffic light until I was editing the picture.

It looked as if it didn’t make sense to make either cars or cyclists stop here unless it is for pedestrians, and the pedestrian crossing is request-only anyway (and very quiet at that). But now I see that it’s actually to protect cyclists going straight ahead, towards the bridge, from cars turning faintly right into the street that runs alongside the bridge until one has to turn either left or right at the river quay. As I’ve hardly ever done anything except turn faintly right into that street myself, I hadn’t noticed.

Not that it wouldn’t be a good idea to make right-turning cyclists exempt from the light: there’s plenty of room for them to the right of any cars.

Nice of you to subvert a standard “railway station and getting lost” dream by having the train to Paris take only about half an hour, and letting me find the church easily, close to the station. But it was strange to find a lay service in progress in a church that’s so riddled with priests in waking life. And the study session afterwards in French (it was Paris after all) was so daunting that I preferred to go into town and look around until it was time to meet my other half and go to the notary.

I did indeed pass the notary’s office, but it was closed, saying “it’s not here” and specifying where it was instead; but when we got there in the evening it turned out to be in the original place after all. The notary’s wife-cum-secretary spoke excellent Dutch with a charming accent, a very good thing because even in my dreams I can’t handle French legalese. I think I got a legacy of about fifty euros— probably enough to pay for the train ticket as it was only half an hour.

I was eleven and a half and already a geek. My parents bought a TV set just before the Moon landing— perhaps for it, I’d have to ask my father. My mother was, on hindsight, wacky. She got me out of bed in the middle of the night, “they’re going to walk on the moon!”

I’m eternally grateful. Seeing things while they happen, even remote, is always better than the report afterwards.

In November 1989 I was visiting my parents just as the Berlin Wall fell. My father and I watched it and said “we’re seeing history happen here!” In 1969 I was too young to realise that, I think, and though my father is much more geeky than my mother ever was he wasn’t geeky enough then to alert me to it.

I’ve always intended to get my daughters out of bed for the first Mars landing, but the way things are going now I think they’ll all have left home by then. But we have tried to teach them to appreciate real things, to recognise history when it happens, and to care about small steps just in case they turn out to be big leaps.

We went to Utrecht to celebrate our sixteenth wedding anniversary, and to buy books to take on holiday and bras at SandrabrA because that’s the only place we know of that has the right combination of very small girth and generous cup size for the teenagers (and sort-of-medium girth and generous cup size for me; I have a really well-fitting bra for the first time in my life, a rather strange sensation, not completely pleasant for now because underwiring takes a lot of getting used to but it does wonders for my figure). While we were there anyway, we thought we’d find a nice museum.

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