Neil Hopcroft

i couldn’t understand the announcement but the sigh from my fellow passengers made it clear. I’ve got as far as almelo with no sign of a train. Oh well.

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Thats my first 2 week stint in Holland over and I’m flying home (if I can call England that these days?) before the football madness takes over the country on Sunday. I’ll be back in England for the next couple of weeks, does anyone know of anything happening in London any evenings next week? Or anyone want to meet up one night?

has anyone seen a stray de lorean yet?

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for some ill explicable reason there is a marching band playing waltzing matilda on their fourth circuit of the block. I guess there’s not much to do in lonneker on a weeknight.

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Thats not the Britain I know.

According to my calculations I need only five of the six litres of Cola I bought to get my recommended daily calorie intake. Maybe I was a little over eager, but even two litres in I’m still melting.

The mackrel sky is going to turn to thunder sometime soon, the air is getting closer. This weather does nothing for my appetite, but a kilo of strawberries helps – the punnets didn’t look that big when I ordered two of them.

Theres still a whirlwind going on in my life. I have landed in my new role as a Symbian developer at Service2Media in the town of Enschede in the Netherlands, only a few miles from the German border.

Commercial decency prevents me from talking too much detail, suffice to say that its a small company making software for mobile phones, but you’d probably guessed that much already. I’m staying in a small hotel in the small town of Lonneker, a couple of miles north of Enschede, and getting lifts to the office with the Ukranians. Who are mostly quite fun, but appear also not to have gotten the hang of dealing with the local cyclists – silent killers and then some.

The hotel were trying to lend me a bike this morning but I had already gone into town. I’m not sure I could hold my own on these streets anyway.

The current plan is that I’m working half and half from here and England, two weeks in each, but quite how that is going to work out I don’t know yet. Its a short term solution for six months until we all see how it works, and then probably be more continuously in Holland.

Last night brought lots of excitement, with Holland playing their next game in the world cup – one day I’m going to live in a country that is at least represented by a non-horrible colour. Orange? Really! Anyone got any suggestions. Still, at least it meant the journey home was quiet, and would have been quick if our driver hadn’t taken us on an accidental scenic tour. Oh well.

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…book. The modern wonder has locked me out for daring to login from another new network while they are still giving out my data to all-comers. Ho hum, i’ll stick with lj for the moment.

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…or is that half Dutch? I’m flying to Amsterdam to start my new job today. More info when the whirlwind stops.

Its been such a long time since I’ve been to an attended filling station that I had even forgotten that the ‘self-service’ signs actually mean something.

There are some strange microclimates going on here, we can see the rain rolling in over the peaks, sometimes it comes as snow, sometimes its mist. I think my fascination with time-lapse photography is going to get a little exercise over the next few weeks.

The 9000 made it from the Baltic to the Mediterranean with only a couple of ‘whats that weird smell?’ incidents, both of which were eventually traced to Frenchmen burning tyres in a field.

It took us four days, with stops for the night in Denmark, Germany and France. I think it was a good call to take the German route rather than the French – BMW and Audi pilots are rather more predictable than those in Peugeots and Citroens.

The final stages over the Pyrenees into Andorra were a little hairy, with the pass being somewhat snowy and covered in hairpin bends. Thank goodness for the tunnel.

Still, we’ve arrived now and we’re settling in for the month here. No more driving for a bit – a total of nearly 7000km in 10 days and now I want to stop moving.