7 Seconds...

Embedding of this particular video is disabled, so you might need to CLICKIE HERE if you'd like to see the very powerful version of 7 Seconds, performed by London's Primrose Hill's darling Neneh Cherry - A gorgeous mama and musician - She's the same age as me, but she's actually now been a grand-mama for 5 years - YIKES! - and this is her collaboration (one of her many over the years with so many musicians while she brought up her family), with the fabulous Youssou N'Dour, from Senegal...



°Yousou N'Dour singing in his mother tongue;

Boul ma sene, boul ma guiss madi re nga fokni mane
Khamouma li neka thi sama souf ak thi guinaw
Beugouma kouma khol oaldine yaw li neka si yaw
mo ne si man, li ne si mane moye dilene diapale

°Neneh Cherry taking over here;

Roughneck and rudeness,
We should be using, on the ones who practice wicked charms
For the sword and the stone
Bad to the bone
Battle is not over
Even when it's won
And when a child is born into this world
It has no concept
Of the tone the skin is living in
It's not a second
7 seconds away
Just as long as I stay
I'll be waiting
It's not a second
7 seconds away
Just as long as I stay
I'll be waiting X3

°Youssou N'Dour again, singing in french(translated in english by "The SenSeï");

-j'assume les raisons qui nous poussent de changer tous,
I assume the reasons that lead us to change everything,

-J'aimerais qu'on oublie leur couleur pour qu'ils esperent
I wish we could forget their color so they can hope

-Beaucoup de sentiments de races qui font qu'ils desesperent
lots of feelings for races which make them lose hope (despair)

-Je veux les deux mains ouvertes,
I want the two hands open,

-Des amis pour parler de leur peine, de leur joie
(and) friends to talk about their sorrow, about their joy

-Pour qu'ils leur filent des infos qui ne divisent pas
so they can give them information that does not divide them)

-Changer
change

°Neneh Cherry as lead vocals henceforth;

7 seconds away
Just as long as I stay
I'll be waiting
It's not a second
7 seconds away
Just as long as I stay
I'll be waiting X3
And when a child is born into this world
It has no concept
Of the tone the skin it´s living in
And there's a million voices
And there's a million voices
To tell you what you should be thinking
So you better sober up for just a second
We´re 7 seconds away
Just as long as I stay
I'll be waiting
It's not a second
We´re 7 seconds away
For just as long as I stay
I'll be waiting
It's not a second
7 seconds away
Just as long as I stay
I'll be waiting

A song about diversity and difference, and the richness in all of us who should not be divided by colour or faith, anger or war, greed or desperation...avarice ou desespoir...

I'm back on me soapbox again, so it seems... So sorry about that, mes bloggy adventurers!

Bohemian, Bo-Ho Chic!

For obvious reasons (NUDITY), this video disappears from Youtube just as soon as you might say, 'Jack Robinson'... I hope it is here for you today...

I love this song, with its undertones of what we feel in life... That longing to belong, to be loved... To be a part of THAT tribe, or THIS tribe... To be different... While at the same time, to be free and to be accepted for what you are...



In my own life, I have been described as 'Bohemian' on a number of occasions... I take it to mean arty and creative, outre, colourful and a little mad, as opposed to a 'hacky dorty', laissez-faire housekeeper, which I am too!

I'm never sure if there's a compliment in there, or not!

Make up your own mind...!

I often have the strangest of feelings, particularly when I'm on holiday abroad in Europe; About how I could disappear, and properly assimilate myself into that culture, picking up the language (for I am a linguist), and how I could try to pass as a native among native souls...

I do always feel more 'at home' in most of Europe than I do in much of the Unied Kingdom; My skin fits better, mes sensibilities, my dress sense and colouring too...

I feel it's a very strange thing for me to feel... Dontcha think?

...Incidentally, I always envy people who have an interesting past, who have lived life, who can trace their family history to some significant moments of heroism or belle epoque... I have no fascinating, if tragic, family history that involves holocaust or Madame La Guillotine...

I seem to be a descendant from very 'pedestrian,' if lovely, folk...

Hard-working men and women, miners and labourers, housewives and tram conductresses... People who made their living from the land, or who helped to exploit the land to line the pockets of sometimes already rich men... Or those who provided a service, like running the sweet-counter at Woolworths, or the Co-Op Tea Rooms...

My adored grandmother, Ellen (known as Nelly), together with her elder sister, Jane (rather Jenny), left their 11 siblings (at an age younger than my son is now) to 'live in' to clean the grates and light the fires in a big country home... Jenny married a Navy man, my much-loved great uncle Marcus, or 'Marky', and Nanna found her John Crawford, known as Jack,(with whom she would have four children), who was to lose his right leg early - Below the knee - In an accident at the Pit, when he was sitting beside the line, taking his lunch, or bait, and a coal-laden trolley ran over him...

And, are we ever satisfied with our lot in life, with who we are in our skins, I wonder...

Perhaps it's the (probably romanticized, non?!) gypsy in my soul!

What think you, my bloggy mistrals?

Six Word Saturday - "Love - What Goes Around, Comes Around..."

I love this clipette of Justin Timberlake in Paris, at Bercy in Paris, where we have stayed a few times as a family on previous hollingberries...

Perhaps the lyrics of Justin's song don't entirely fit with my sentiment on this post, but I heard this song a few times on our hols in the Netherlands as lift muzaak or otherwise, and I just wanted to say, prior to the wonderful Six Word Saturday, (the date of which I've got quite wrong a little recently - Thanks for those of you who've tried to save me from myself in terms of my wrong-doings with Saturday dates for pre-scheduling postings while I was on my hols..., and thanks to Cate and her followers for SWS);

...I just wanted to say that, with 'Love - What goes around, comes around...'

What I mean is, 'You get what you give in life', mes bloggy Treasure-Chests...

'Spread your rubber loving, and it'll come right back to you...
as the divine Ms Macy Gray once had occasion to say, bless her little cotton socks...

...Thank you for your love and care in my absence from the Blogworld's mists, charms and electricity, mes amis du coeur... Merci, Grazie, Gracias, Vielen Dank, Dank uw!

Did I mention that I love you, wild heart and soul?

Shhh! You'll wake her - Make sure you just tiptoe out again... And shut that door... Can't a girl get her ugly-sleep around here?!

Normal Fhina service will be resumed as soon as she has taken her post-holiday nap-ette!

I just wanted to say that I've spent almost a fortnight struggling to read some (never all, I'm not a very techie person!) of your comments via my new mobile 'phone handset, having upgraded me contract before me hols; A 'phone which was furnished with Destructions, totally impossible to understand, I might add!

And, you need to have the eyesight of a bleeding hawk to be able to decipher the script on the tiny screen, and then you tap on the touch-screen to highlight what you sort of want to read and double-click through to, but it's never explained to you that this inevitably hardly ever works... I struggled, I did, but the bits that I managed to read, (and I promise to catch up later this weekend -- I pwomise!), made me feel your pulse, and love you madly, it did!

I missed you like crazy, even though we, as a relatively dysfunctional family, did have a wonderful couple of weeks around Amsterdam, taking in the many glories of the fabulous Netherlands... More laters...

...Did I tell you we had lovely weather apart from one slightly duller and cooler day?

...Did I highlight the crazy, clever, funny, friendly Dutch folk (not unlike Chairman Bill can be, when he's not being all billy-goat-gruff!), who guided us from trains to trams, from buses to waterways, and making us laugh all the way?

...Did I say that we'd been evacuated from our hotel following a bomb-threat, and that we were actually in the spa when the sirens rang out?! What a picture we made, all three of us, wet, disrobed and raggled!

...Did I tell you about the fact that a bridge we were just about to travel over by train on our way back from a day in Gouda, got hit by a ship, so we had to take a crazy, roundabout bus trip with all our fellow, suitably confused, Dutch commuters who, like us, didn't have a clue what was going on?



...Only in the Netherlands, does a Dutch barge ship hit a rail-bridge, mes bloggy Appelgebaks!

Thank you for telling me that you missed me, mes dahlinks! - I want you to know that last night, feeling the ravages of what felt to me like the end of a hurricane during our ferry crossing of the seas, that I began to think on all of you, (yes, even the lurkers - Come out, come out, wherever you are?!), and that y'all saw me through a Night of Keeping Watch just in case we were summonsed to the lifeboats...



Did you know I can be a little bit of a Drama Queen?

Did I tell you yet that I'm never, ever, getting on a ferry again?

Did you hear me say that I love you, and missed you like the Crazy Cat Lady that I am??!

Well I do; So there! Mwah! Mwah! Mwah! Gotcha!

Chasing Vermeer!

From la Wiki, who else?!: "Johannes, Jan or Johan Vermeer (baptized in Delft as Joannis on October 31 1632, and buried in the same city under the name Jan on December 16 1675) was a Dutch Baroque painter who specialized in exquisite, domestic interior scenes of middle class life. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial genre painter in his lifetime. He seems never to have been particularly wealthy, perhaps because he produced relatively few paintings, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death.



Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, using bright colours, sometimes expensive pigments, with a preference for cornflower blue and yellow. He is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work.



After having been forgotten, but not by some connoisseurs, Vermeer was rediscovered by Gustav Friedrich Waagen and Thoré Bürger, who published an essay attributing sixty-six pictures to him, (although only thirty-five paintings are firmly attributed to him today). Since that time Vermeer's reputation has grown, and he is now acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age".

Yes, it's still where the cheese comes from...

The Big Cheese!

More Windmills!

Well, it is the Netherlands!

The Netherlands is so closely associated with windmills, that it's often the first fact people recall about the country. The Dutch built windmills for many centuries (and to some extent, the windmills built the country itself, since without them much of the land drainage could not have occured). In that time the mills were developed for corn milling, land drainage, saw milling, and in fact all manner of industrial purposes. Despite this widespread use, Dutch mills are in may ways quite primitive - using canvas sails, and turned to wind by hand (as distinct from the automated mechanisms that were developed for English windmills, including the fantail, and shuttered sails).

There are a very pleasing number of remaining windmills in the Netherlands - the number is about 1150 and rising, in that the Dutch only count complete workable mills, and in the past 10 years especially many extensive rebuilds have occured to add to this number.

Oh my goodness, finally a windmill!!! And some language : )

and some cows... coos

The Frisian Islands are an archipelago of Islands spread along the eastern edge of the North Sea along the coasts of the Netherlands and Germany. Now for the rest of the story. Contemporary Celts, most noteably the Irish and the Scots, speak an Anglo-Frisian language just as their English and American-English counterparts do. Here's how. Anglo-Frisian is a subdivision of Germanic languages, which is in turn divided into several sub-categories:

------Anglo-Frisian, or Insular Anglo-Frisian, Languages--English and Scots (as opposed to Scots-Gaelic, which is Celtic)

------Frisian, or Continental Anglo-Frisian--West Frisian, Saterland Frisian, or East Frisian, and North Frisian

Anglo-Frisian languages are characterized by the palatalization of the Proto-Germanic k to a coronal affricate between front vowels. In other words, English speakers say cheese instead of kase (German) or kaas (Dutch). Nevertheless, it is also noticeable that English and Scots have a similar vocabulary to Dutch and German. English church is Scots kirk, Dutch kerk, and German kirche.

Highland Scots* may be Celtic, and a few still speak Scottish Gaelic just as their Irish cousins many speak Irish Gaelic. However, many of the inhabitants of Scotland (more specifically 1.5 million of them), Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland speak a version of English known as "braid" (or broad) Scots, which is part of the Anglo-Frisian language family.

Basically, many of us in the north of the British Isles speak Germanic sounding languages... And many of our words are the same as Frisian today... We in the north of England say, 'Broon coo', for Brown Cow... The Dutch/Frisian is identical...

Crazy, huh?!

Fietsen ...

All you might ever want to know about cycling in flat, very flat Holland, is here...

CLICKIE

Houseboats

Styx - Boat On the River

Take me back to my boat on the river
I need to go down, I need to come down
take me back to my boat on the river
and I won't cry out anymore...

Time stands still as I gaze in her waters
...she eases me down, touching me gently
with the waters that flow past my boat on the river
so I don't cry out anymore

oh the river is wide
the river it touches my life like the waves on the sand
and all roads lead to tranquillity base
where the frown on my face disappears
take me down to my boat on the river
and I won't cry out anymore

Oh the river is deep
the river it touches my life like the waves on the sand
and all roads lead to tranquillity base
where the frown on my face disappears
take me down to my boat on the river
I need to go down, won't you let me go down
take me back to my boat on the river
and I won't cry out anymore
and I won't cry out anymore
and I won't cry out anymore...

Dutch Pancakes and a cup of Joe...

La Wiki had her mouth full the other day, when I walked into the Temple of Wisdom...

She told me, between, great gobfulls of cheese and bread that. "Dutch cuisine is shaped by the practice of farming, including the cultivation of the soil for raising crops and the raising of domesticated animals and the history of the Netherlands.

The Netherlands is renowned for its varieties of cheese and is where Dutch process chocolate originated. Dutch cuisine is somewhat limited in its diversity of dishes (like many Northern European cuisines) and includes a high consumption of vegetables compared to the consumption of meat. Dutch cookies (butter cookies) are popular in the United States and are sold in round, decorated tins usually around Christmas".

"Dutch agriculture roughly consists of five sectors: fishery, animal husbandry, and tillage-based, fruit-based, and greenhouse-based agriculture. The last has had little or no influence on traditional Dutch eating habits...

Dutch people invite friends over for "koffietijd" (coffee time), which consists of coffee and cake or a biscuit, served between 10 and 11 a.m. (before lunch) and/or between 7 and 8 pm (after dinner) The Dutch drink coffee and tea throughout the day, often served with a single biscuit. Dutch thrift led to the famous standard rule of only one cookie with each cup of coffee. It has been suggested that the reasons for this can be found in the Protestant mentality and upbringing in the northern Netherlands. The traditionally Catholic south does not share this tradition (in Limburg a vlaai (sweet pie or pastry with filling), cut in eight pieces, is traditionally served when visitors are expected).

A popular Dutch story (never confirmed) says that in the late 1940s the wife of the then Prime minister, Willem Drees, served coffee and one biscuit to a visiting American diplomat, who then became convinced that the money from the Marshall Plan (European Recovery Program, the primary plan of the United States for rebuilding and creating a stronger foundation for the countries of Western Europe, after World War II) was being well-spent.



"Café au lait is also very common. It is called koffie verkeerd (literally "wrong-way-round-coffee") and consists of equal parts black coffee and hot milk. The Dutch drink tea without milk and the tea is quite a lot weaker than the typical English types of tea which are taken with milk. Other hot drinks used to include warm lemonade, called kwast (hot water with lemon juice), and anijsmelk (hot milk with aniseed). In the autumn and winter the very popular hot chocolate or chocolate milk is drunk. Both anijsmelk and kwast are hardly drunk anymore and have lost their popularity"

Of course, some of the Amsterdam Coffee Houses are famous for more than their coffee... but that is not, I repeat NOT why la Fhina is over there!

Colourful Delft...

La Wiki knows...
"Delft is a city and municipality in the province of South Holland (Zuid-Holland), the Netherlands. It is located in between Rotterdam and The Hague. Delft is primarily known for its typically Dutch town centre (with canals); also for the painter Vermeer, Delft Blue pottery (Delftware), the Delft University of Technology, and its association with the Royal Family.

The city dates from the 13th century. It received its charter in 1246.

The association of the House of Orange with Delft began when William of Orange (Willem van Oranje), nicknamed William the Silent (Willem de Zwijger), took up residence there in 1572. William was the leader at the time in the struggle against the Spanish, the Eighty Years' War.



Delft was one of the leading cities of Holland and was equipped with the necessary city walls to serve as a headquarters. When William was shot to death in 1584 by Balthazar Gerards in the hall of the Prinsenhof, the family's traditional burial place in Breda was in the hands of the Spanish. Therefore, he was buried in the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church), starting a tradition for the House of Orange that has continued to the present day.

Delft is well known for the Delft pottery ceramic products which were styled on the imported Chinese porcelain of the 17th century. The city had an early start in this area since it was a home port of the Dutch East India Company.



The painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) was born in Delft. Vermeer used Delft streets and home interiors as the subject or background of his paintings.

Several other famous painters lived and worked in Delft at that time, such as Pieter de Hoogh, Carel Fabritius, Nicolaes Maes, Gerard Houckgeest and Hendrick Cornelisz. van Vliet. They all were members of the Delft School. The Delft School is known for its images of domestic life, views of households, church interiors, courtyards, squares and the streets of Delft. The painters also produced pictures showing historic events, flower paintings, portraits for patrons and the court, and decorative pieces of art".

This is the area that the pilgrims left from to travel to the New World...

Delft and a Coo!

Wiki is after me buying her some blue and white pottery from Delft, when all I want to do is visit the scenes and spaces inhabited by the painter, Vermeer...



We have always to agree to disagree, La Wiki and I... Occasionally!

Wiki tells me, and she does ramble...

"Delftware, or Delft pottery, denotes blue and white pottery made in and around Delft in the Netherlands and the tin-glazed pottery made in the Netherlands from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

Delftware in the latter sense is a type of pottery in which a white glaze is applied, usually decorated with metal oxides. Delftware includes pottery objects of all descriptions such as plates, ornaments and tiles.

The earliest tin-glazed pottery in the Netherlands was made in Antwerp by Guido da Savino in 1512. The manufacture of painted pottery may have spread from the south to the northern Netherlands sometime during the 1560s. It was made in Middelburg and Haarlem in the 1570s and in Amsterdam in the 1580s. Much of the finer work was produced in Delft, but simple everyday tin-glazed pottery was made in places such as Gouda, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Dordrecht.

The main period of tin-glaze pottery in the Netherlands was 1640-1740. From about 1640 Delft potters began using personal monograms and distinctive factory marks. The Guild of St Luke, to which painters in all media had to belong, admitted ten master potters in the thirty years between 1610 and 1640 and twenty in the nine years 1651 to 1660. In 1654 a gunpowder explosion in Delft destroyed many breweries and as the brewing industry was in decline they became available to pottery makers looking for larger premises; some retained the old brewery names, making them famous throughout northern Europe, e.g. The Double Tankard, The Young Moors' Head and The Three Bells.

The use of marl, a type of clay rich in calcium compounds, allowed the Dutch potters to refine their technique and to make finer items. The usual clay body of Delftware was a blend of three natural clays, one local, one from Tournai and one from the Rhineland.

From about 1615, the potters began to coat their pots completely in white tin glaze instead of covering only the painting surface and coating the rest with clear glaze. They then began to cover the tin-glaze with clear glaze, which gave depth to the fired surface and smoothness to cobalt blues, ultimately creating a good resemblance to porcelain.

During the Dutch Golden Age, the Dutch East India Company had a lively trade with the East and imported millions of pieces of Chinese porcelain in the early 1600s. The Chinese workmanship and attention to detail impressed many. Only the richest could afford the early imports. Although Dutch potters did not immediately imitate Chinese porcelain, they began to do after the death of the Wanli Emperor in 1620, when the supply to Europe was interrupted. Delftware inspired by Chinese originals persisted from about 1630 to the mid-eighteenth century alongside European patterns.

By about 1700 several factories were using enamel colours and gilding over tin-glaze, requiring a third kiln firing at a lower temperature.

Delftware ranged from simple household items - plain white earthenware with little or no decoration - to fancy artwork. Most of the Delft factories made sets of jars, the kast-stel set. Pictorial plates were made in abundance, illustrated with religious motifs, native Dutch scenes with windmills and fishing boats, hunting scenes, landscapes and seascapes. Sets of plates were made with the words and music of songs; dessert was served on them and when the plates were clear the company started singing. The Delft potters also made tiles in vast numbers (estimated at eight hundred million) over a period of two hundred years; many Dutch houses still have tiles that were fixed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Delftware became popular and was widely exported in Europe and even reached China and Japan. Chinese and Japanese potters made porcelain versions of Delftware for export to Europe.

Some regard Delftware from about 1750 onwards as artistically inferior. Caiger-Smith says that most of the later wares "were painted with clever, ephemeral decoration. Little trace of feeling or originality remained to be lamented when at the end of the eighteenth century the Delftware potteries began to go out of business." By this time Delftware potters had lost their market to British porcelain and the new white earthenware. One or two remain: the Tichelaar factory in Makkum, Friesland, founded in 1594 and De Koninklijke Porceleyne Fles ("The Royal Porcelain Bottle") founded in 1653".

Come, Visit the Kattenkabinet...

Fhina is on her hols in Amsterdam, meanwhile, La Goddess, Wiki, tells me: "The KattenKabinet ("Cat Cabinet") is an art museum in Amsterdam devoted to works depicting cats. The museum collection includes paintings, drawings, sculptures and other works of art by Pablo Picasso, Rembrandt, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Corneille, Sal Meijer, Théophile Steinlen, and Jože Ciuha, among others.

The museum is housed in a canalside building at Herengracht 497, in the grand Gouden Bocht ("Golden Bend") of this canal. The house and the adjacent building at Herengracht 499 were built in 1667 for the patrician brothers Willem and Adriaen van Loon. Through the luck of the draw, Willem was given the house at number 497. Later, the house was inhabited by Amsterdam mayor Jan Calkoen and Amsterdam pensionary Engelbert van Berckel, among others. John Adams visited van Berckel at the house during his time as U.S. ambassador to the Dutch republic.

In 1985, the building was restored, and in 1990 the museum was founded by Bob Meijer in memory of his red tomcat John Pierpont Morgan (named after the American banker J. P. Morgan)".

Wow, catmania!

Come with me, mes furry, purry, fuzzy friends... Enjoy! Miaow......Purrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

A little mouse with clogs on...

Fhina is in Amsterdam - Do you remember this one?! Go listen, it'll take you back to your childhood, I promise... Here are the lyrics:

A mouse lived in a windmill in old Amsterdam
A windmill with a mouse in and he wasn't grousin'
He sang every morning "How lucky I am
Living in a windmill in old Amsterdam".

(Chorus)
I saw a mouse -- where? There on the stair
Where on the stair? Right there
A little mouse with clogs on -- well, I declare
Going clip-clippety-clop on the stair - oh yeah

This mouse, he got lonesome, he took him a wife
A windmill with mice in, it's hardly surprisin'
She sang every morning "How lucky I am
Living in a windmill in old Amsterdam"

(Chorus)

First they had triplets and then they had quins
A windmill with quins in, triplets and twins in
They sang every morning "How lucky we are
Living in a windmill in Amsterdam -- ya"

(Chorus)

The daughters got married and so did the sons
The windmill had christenings when no one was listening
They all sang in chorus "How lucky we am
Living in a windmill in old Amsterdam"

(Chorus)

A mouse lived in a windmill, so snug and so nice
There's nobody there now but a whole load of mice

Blijdorp Zoo, Rotterdam...

Fhina is on her hollingberries! She may be here today; Then again, she may not!

Six Word Saturday: More of Amsterdam - Damrak and Canals...

A look at Amsterdam...

Where I intend to be doing a lot of relaxing, as well as seeing something of the country... Oops, a few more words than I ought to be offering on Six Word Saturday... Soz, mes bloggy tulippen!

Oh, if anyone wants to add mes details over at showmyface.com, Cate's place... I should dance at your wedding!

Oops, I've been and gone and fallen over again! Must be all that cheese!

Tales from Amsterdam...

Goede Morge!

This is where I am travelling today, mes bloggy Blackberries...

I am taking a big ferry across the North Sea, to the land of clogs, and cheese, and windmills and art, and tulips and bicycles and dams and ships and history and love...

In my absence, Blogger will be showing one or two piccies from the Netherlands, and a few choice facts... I hope you find it edutaining, and I hope you'll stop by and keep me informed about what you're doing on your blogs, and what's happening in your world...

See you around, mes bloggy chums... Mwah! Mwah! Mwah!

Gotcha! Now I'm off to try to find me passport, or they'll never let me leave the Tyne!

Tot ziens!