It’s almost two years since our departure from our lovely farm. We have nestled down very nicely. The books have found their place on the shelves, knives and forks in the right trays and chairs’ restless rotating around different spots have calmed as well.

It is strange how with age one seems to find domestic permanency a much more pressing need than when young. Moving around comes with youth. I was looking at the travel section of the Herald yesterday. “Fancy fourteen days on a Rhine cruise” I asked H? “I don’t know”, “depends on the company that we might have to share the dining table with”, answered H.

Too right, just imagine the horrors of some pro-Hanson or anti boat people sharing the lasagna with, or, leaning over the railing surveying yet another Castle perched on a rocky outcrop at Karlsruhe, a remark “ I wonder how Mavis is going with her divorce from that bastard Jason at Wollongong?”

We have perused many travel options and all seem to have lost the appeal of exploration or sight-seeing. I am and was never one to visit ‘sights’ and the Niagara Falls or Machu Picchu will have to forget the Oostermans ever visiting them. The ‘Mother Temple’ in Bali might have to be included as well. We never managed to go there despite having visited that island of magic many times. Walt Disney’s fun parks, oh no never. Never even been a fan of comic strips except ‘Eric the Norseman’,  which my dear old Aunt Agnes would cut out of her Amsterdam newspaper and sent it by post to me in The Hague. I remember one episode whereby a man’s head was chopped off by a large and evil man lifting his sword. I dwelled on that for months. I read yesterday, that children are naturally drawn to stories that include much sadness. Chopping a head off is a sad thing, very permanently sad.

The one travel option we are still dwelling over is the possibility of going to France or Italy and just rent an apartment and live a bit like the locals, observe all the going ons of a ‘normal life’ but set in a different country with different language and cultural habits. I’ll just have to Google all the available apartments in Rome or Paris.

I’ll put on the coffee now, can’t wait to go and travel around on the Internet.