The Sols Hole, that would be the accurate translation of the Dutch name Het Solsche Gat.
It is near the place where my late grandmother lived, Garderen in the middle of the forests in Swampyland. Remember I told you about roasting Chestnuts at her place?
From the time when the heating went out in winter and we got snowed in and hills were hard to take with a pushbike.
When we had to choose between Home and Away and Coronation Street, and we were absolutely sure we had seen The Grey Lady and Castle Hill wasn’t hollowed out yet.
When we found time to go out together and drink a pint or two or more, when we lived high above the ground in a castle and had parties every weekend. And life was never dull.
We have something that others don’t have and it is friendship.
My first gold watch, I bought it in 1989 at Ratner’s in Norwich. So many good memories come back now when I pick it up to look at it.
Sometimes, just sometimes, I wish I could go back in time and hop on my pushbike and speed down Kett’s Hill and turn left into the city center to go there again.
It’s safely tucked away with all the other good memories now.
Years ago in the early 1990’s I lived in a little two bedroom bungalow along a dirt road in the country side of Swampyland. I was struggling to find a job and regarded as poor but I could always pay the bill for heating oil so I was ok I reckoned, albeit only just.
The Dutch were still paying each other in Guilders then, there was no Euro yet, people didn’t even know the word. There was a union of European countries, but normal people didn’t know about it or didn’t care. We just lived our peaceful lives in those days.
This is how I remember it, Brundall railway station. In 1989 I got off the train here, with a knot tied in my stomach. A month before I left the army, not knowing what to do with my life and my uncle, The Brains they called him in the family, advised me “to go far away for a while to grow up and find out who I am”.
It meant a turn in my life that shaped me into what I am still now, I know that sounds a bit cryptic but my real friends know what I mean.
I love watching these old films. As a child we had this enormous Philips Colour Television made in Sweden.
We watched films like Doctor Zhivago, The Sound of Music, Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines, To Sir, With Love and all kinds of other lovely films that are now Classics.
That wonderful colour television is now long gone but I can still remember sitting there and watching it and if I close my eyes I can still smell the hot, orange glowing, dusty vacuum tubes in the back.
Yesterday my beloved lovely wife bought me this Christmas Sweater.
I have been asking for one for weeks (year after year before Christmas really), one of those knitted sweaters with a pattern of snow crystals, reindeer and antlers but she refused firmly as she said it would make me look like a fool.
It is possible to both love and hate something and our La Multipla was one of these things. A little less than five years ago we bought the car from a shady car flogger (the type of car sellers that rent a field, sell a lot of dodgy cars planted on it and then disappear).
