Category: West Yorkshire

This is what I was doing exactly two weeks ago. Sitting in the plane flying back to good old Amsterdam, wondering what the future would bring. Not quite sure when if ever I will be returning to that nice area in England, but life goes on as usual.

Not feeling sorry for myself.

The plane landed long ago, and in two weeks much might have happened, but it hasn't (at least not yet). In the meantime, things go along as usual.

Here's a little quaint bridge right across from a smallish village called Burnsall where I took my family when they visited, way off somewhere quiet and remote in the middle of the Yorkshire Dales.

Driving on the left side of the road takes a bit getting used to, but actually it is not that bad after all. Managing the stick-shift with your left hand is a little bit like trying to cut paper with left-handed scissors, but before you realize it there you are zipping around all over the place, lost in the middle of the Yorkshire Dales, speeding along those winding, narrow country roads just like yet another everyday driving bloke.

What a pleasant surprise it is to walk outside of the office and see my family coming up the road to greet me. Strange but true. Now I will have four days off to show them the area and discover many new places that I have not been to yet. Finally with a car I am a hundred times more mobile and can search all those places which until now have been just tiny dots on the map.

Figuring that I would return home one day later this week on Saturday, I could have a day extra to check out the area and prepare myself better for the family visit next week Thursday. My plane didn't leave until the evening, so the plan was to check out from the hotel early in the morning, dump my luggage at the airport, rent a car and look around, returning at the end of the day in time for my evening flight.

I arrived at the check-in counter around ten in the morning, only to discover that my well planned itinerary had one vital flaw in it.

Going home for the weekends has become almost a kind of short weekly vacation for me.

Though I am exceedignly busy and pre-occupied with the intellectual challenges at Pace five days in a row, those short two days home provide me with much needed and renewed energy and creativity, putting it all into the right perspective.

Work is great, but being home is more than fantastic. Family life has become a prized possession which should never ever be underestimated, nore in my case will it ever be.

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Finally by the end of each week just as I am getting used to the fact that everyone drives on the left side of the road, I come back home for the weekend and have to readjust my bearings again to believe that people are really driving on the right side of the road.

In many ways, during the adjustment period transitioning from left to right or from right to left, it's like living in a nebulous mirror world. The world of moving automobiles is slightly skewed and uncertain.

When crossing the street am I supposed to look to the left or should I look to the right?

Since I value my life quite highly and would prefer to survive long enough to achieve yet another challenging goal in life, I choose to swing my head back and forth three times from left to right and from right to left and back again, just in case.

Even if it makes me look like an idiot or an overly uncertain person.

After a long day of work, I figured it would be nice to take an extended evening stroll and discover some of the surrounding area.

Looking at the map of the area around my hotel in Shipley, I randomly jabbed my finger downwards and decided that Swain Hill looked like a nice place to visit.

Half an hour later I was huffing and puffing up the steep hill, completely lost between one of the hidden crooks of a zigzag road.

This week I learned what knackered means, which depending on the context used is British slang for one the following:

• Tired, really exhausted
• Broken or defective
• Completely drunk

Last week Thursday, I flew over for the day to this place called Saltaire in West Yorkshire, and I was completely amazed how beautiful it is there.

Remembering all those things I had learned in school about the Industrial Revolution in England, I had been afraid it would turn out to be a dark and gloomy place, old sooty buildings, the air polluted with me gasping and coughing.

Boy was I wrong.

Lots of clean, neatly structured buildings, a quaint river, green rolling hills and lots of trees, the sky crystal clear and fantastically blue.