December, 2018 - cushtie.com - Page 2

Month: December 2018

  • A trip to the countryside

    We went to Tunbridge Wells today to see some friends from Singapore who’ve moved back. Getting there from Beckenham is a bit of a mission without a car: we narrowly missed a train at Beckenham Junction, then after taking two more trains to reach Orpington, missed another connection by mere seconds, and finally arrived about […]

  • A quiet time with the kids

    This afternoon I had the girls to look after and entertain, because my wife went off to seek human contact on her own. Destroyer didn’t want to go out so it ended up being just me, my dad and La Serpiente.

  • Manoeuvres

    I took the girls to the park this morning, but was accompanied by a cacophony of complaint. That was because I was taking them to the wrong park (La Serpiente was desperate to go to Kelsey Park and climb on a very high climbing frame) and then Destroyer was sad and hungry and I had […]

  • Back from Bergen

    Today we went to the aquarium in Bergen. It’s fun: we arrived just as they were feeding the penguins, who rejoice in ridiculous names like Pingu Starr. I didn’t realise quite how much my girls love looking at fish (especially flat fish and rats) and after we’d checked everything out, we went down the street […]

  • Gingerbread in Bergen

    For something mad like 23 years, Bergen has had a festival of gingerbread houses. This is in a disused swimming pool, now filled with hundreds of gingerbread houses, churches, sports stadiums, lighthouses, ships, airships… We wandered through darkened hallways filled with gingerbread.

  • Walking around Bergen

    We took a funicular up to the top of a mountain today and looked down on Bergen. It was ruddy cold; although it hasn’t snowed at sea level, there was ice everywhere at the top, covering the playground and the area around it. After the kids had swung on the swings for half an hour, […]

  • Bergen

    For the first time in more than ten years, I’m back in Norway. This is the second new country for the girls this year, after Sweden, and after getting here on a cheap flight from Gatwick, they were keen to run around. We took them to a Christmas market in the middle of town where […]

  • Lying in wait

    Although my flight took off about an hour late from Singapore, it made up time and arrived only ten minutes behind schedule. I slept for most of the flight. I woke up, discovered that The Predator is a terrible sequel to Predator, the sort that somehow makes the original worse as well, and then I […]

  • Off we go again…

    It’s important to prepare for a long flight by being rested and hydrated, which was why when I went to the office Christmas party last night, I was doublefisting champagne for the first hour, and then on the wasabi martinis after that.

  • Swimming Lesson #43

    Today I did half an hour of freestyle, wherein I kicked a bit too much and was probably showing how tired I was (up late last night prepping my facial hair for tonight’s party) and then we did some backstroke (which I’m better at than freestyle because it involves lying down, and then some butterfly.