Liam in Durham (summer 2006)

Here is Liam and Mummy down by the river, watching the boats. Notice the toy car. From about the age of 1, Liam used to carry one around with him as a kind of comfort, but he no longer needs them so much, certainly not when we go out, but he does like one for when he goes to bed (his Sarge off the film 'Cars' being the current favourite).




Having built a tower on top of his toy box, Liam sets about embellishing it with hieroglyphics whose mysteries only become apparent if you rotate the images clockwise through 90 degrees. He then diversifies into giving a plastic duck a makeover.

Sunderland 0 Arsenal 3 (Liam's first live football match)

When a colleague, Professor Timothy Clark, popped his head around my door at work and said he was thinking of getting tickets for the visit of the Arsenal to play Sunderland in May 2006, I knew that a defining moment in my life as a father had arrived... This was to be my son's first live game of footy.

I was nervous. If truth be told, Liam's obessive devotions in life to date had been his toy cars and Thomas the Tank Engine. On the rare occasions when he had deigned to kick a football he'd shown himself capable of wellying it with promising power and accuracy. But it hadn't captured his imagination to the exclusion of all other possible distractions for hours on end as I'd, naturally, hoped for...

So, as we set off I feared that he'd be freaked out by the whole experience (the crowd, the noise, Sunderland's hapless defending) and it'd put him off for life, and I'd never be able to live with myself, denying my own son the joys of being a football fan.

It was an evening kickoff. Arsenal arrived needing the points to qualify for the champions League the next season (we were 5th, behind our hilariously hapless neighbours, T*ttenham). 'Fortunately', Sunderland were already relegated so didn't much care. (As Wearsiders now - the river Wear runs through Durham - they are our favoured local team. And, apparently Sparta Rotterdam copied Sunderland's shirt colours...)

We were sat in the Sunderland family enclosure, a few rows up from the touchline. Liam settled on my lap quickly, content to gaze around the huge stadium and gorge on his biscuits. There was little point in telling him that that man there is the most ludicrously talented footballer ever to wear the red and white of the Arsenal so watch and learn... Liam had no idea what was going on, only a vague idea really of the concept of football, but he loved the atmosphere, so a big thankyou to all the Sunderland fans for starting up some Mexican waves which kept him royally entertained! Best of all, though, was that he would mimic the crowd's reactions a good 5 seconds after he first heard it, starting to clap only when the applause had died down, and going "Oooooh!" long after a shot had been skied into the terraces. It was hilarious.

I think he got through it unscathed, and I was a relieved man. Just need to upgrade his 'mild amusement' into 'lifelong, deranged obsession' and my work will be complete.

Arsenal won 3-0.

Centerparcs holiday - 4

After his initial trepidation, Liam couldn't wait to get into the water in Centerparcs' massive indoor heated wet 'n' wild pool. He loved splashing about with all manner of props. Here he is with a giant inflatable 'snake' thing...

... and a football: "Chase it!"

Centerparcs holiday - 3 (Liam in the pool)

We weren't sure whether Liam would take to the massive indoor heated pool at Centerparcs, as he hadn't really been much of a water-baby in Rotterdam...
He took his time to get his head around the idea...
... but then after that he plunged in, and we could hardly stop him dunking his head to drink the water (above) - which he found hilarious (below).
The pool complex at Centerparcs is huge, with loads of great slides and rides for the adults as well, including a flume that winds around the outside of the building, exposing unsuspecting first-timers to the Cumbria drizzle - which should not have been as much fun as it actually was.

Centerparcs holiday - 2

Here is Liam the adventurer at Centerparcs, clambering over the rickety bridge in the outdoor playground, and climbing in one of three indoor adventure playgrounds.

He absolutely loved this section of the complex, not least because once you had reached the top the only options for coming down were 'back-the-way-you-came' or, as you can see, the much preferred big green chute!
We love the concentration on his face in the rope-bridge section (below)...

Centerparcs holiday - 1

In May 2006 we took our first ever family holiday, opting for Centerparcs Cumbria at Whinfell Forest. (The chicken buses in Nicaragua can wait...)
We had a great week's break, even though the weather wasn't fantastic (the west of the country, you see: it's much better over on the east coast)... and even though Arsenal lost the Champions League Final while we were there.

As the pictures show, Centerparcs' grounds at Whinfell Forest are lovely: dense woodland criss-crossed with cycle and pedestrian paths that make it easy and fun to explore. We hired bikes for the whole week on the first day, including one with a kind of wheelbarrow attached to the back for Liam to sit in. Then, with our waterproofs on or close at hand, we journeyed around, up and down all the paths, exploring.
So here is Liam just outside our 'Scandinavian-style' chalet accommodation, looking for and chasing the bunny rabbits that ran around outside. Curiously they were less keen to play with Liam than he was keen to play with them!

It was a fantastic place to take an energetic, curious little boy - once we'd managed to get him dressed! - and we'd recommend it...

Living in Durham - 2

As we said below in another post, Durham cathedral is a gobsmacking sight every time, at any time, from whatever angle. This picture below is of the Cathedral in the half-light of sunrise. Mighty. On several occasions, just walking round the town, and particularly when crossing the footbridge at Gilesgate, we have stopped to marvel at the sight of the cathedral against a sensational sunset...

It looks pretty marvellous lit up subtly at night, as well (this picture doesn't do it justice, but you get the idea...)

The picture above is taken from the Cathedral's tower, and shows the Palace Green in front, the castle in the top left - now, believe it or not, a student hall of residence - and, beyond, the rest of the city. See how relatively compact it is?

We live up by the University's main Science site, not far from the Cathedral (it first hoves into view about a minute into the walk down into town). This is our road, taken by Liam, believe it or not (Dad focussed it, Liam pushed the button...) We rent a property from the University. It's in an ideal position, as a halfway staging post between the University's Business School where I work and town. Plus, Liam now goes to pre-school at St Oswald's, which is theoretically only a two-minute walk from our house, but which ends up more like 5-10 if Liam is on his 'blue bikey', dodging the students on the way to lectures (see another post elsewhere)... He looks so cute in his school uniform. We've not got any pictures to confirm this as yet, but they are planned and imminent!

Living in Durham - 1

We moved from Rotterdam to the lovely little city of Durham, in the North East of England, between Christmas and New Year 2004.

Durham is up near Sunderland and Newcastle and, as we have discovered, is a long way from everywhere else! Even those archetypal Northern cities are way down south for us: Leeds and Bradford are 90 minutes away by train, Manchester is a near-epic 2.5 hours! London is 3 hours and a bit (or 'a lot', if GNER have anything to do with it).


As these selected pictures from splendid local photographer Graeme Peacock and others testify, much of the city centre of Durham is gorgeous, especially the mighty cathedral and Norman castle which sit atop a high promontory right in the middle of the city. Both were designated a World Heritage Site in 1986. The author Bill Bryson, now Chancellor of the University, once wrote famously in his book, 'Notes from a small island':
"If you have never been to Durham, go there at once. Take my car. It's wonderful."

Durham is all cobbled streets in the centre, and there is a lovely walk to be had along the tree-lined banks of the river Wear as it winds around the hill featuring the castle and cathedral. It all looks particularly fabulous in the snow. (We couldn't find any pictures on the Web to prove this, so we'll have to go out and take our own - won't have long to wait). Less so in the rain, but then even parts of Venice can look miserable when it's chucking it down...

Durham's 'posh' image is probably based on the generally well-off students who come to study at the University (this picture is taken from the grounds of Grey College, which we joined as it's nearest our house, and we were asked!), and the fact that the city itself is considerably more pitcturesque than its much bigger neighbouring cities Newcastle, Sunderland, and Middlesbrough. But this image belies the fact that Durham is surrounded by ex-mining villages, many of which now suffer from high unemployment, poor housing and the like. So it is a strange mix.

The city's regeneration is moving apace, and in the last year we have watched as Durham's very own string of built-to-order, top-whack riverside apartments for yuppies has risen up by the Framwellgate bridge. There is also a development going on for a major arts centre (we only have one not-very-adventurous cinema), and there are/were plans for a huge 'wok'-shaped sculpture to be set on one of the city's hills as a tourist attraction. (We're rather taken with the idea of a sculpture of a coal miner with a giant light beacon coming out of the statue's helmet...) Whether those surrounding villages will benefit from all this is open to question, but we may have arrived just before Durham 'arrives' again on the map...

Liam in Rotterdam - 4

Here are some more pictures of Liam, aged 11 months, in our flat in Rotterdam. Look at those big rosy cheeks and those centre back calves...

Liam in Rotterdam - 3

These pictures were taken with our neighbour, Ton van Lith's, digital camera on our 1st wedding anniversary (11th May 2004), with Liam aged 11 months.

It's Liam playing with a "Daddy pen", which were/ are used to highlight the fractionally less turgid sentences in the journal articles Daddy has to read!

He had taken his first steps the month before. For a few days beforehand, he had been gearing up to it, dragging himself to his feet and practising finding his balance. Then, one morning at about 7am in the corridor of our flat, he looked over at both of us with a purposeful stare, as if to say, "Right you two, I've worked out how you two do it, are you ready for this?" and he stumbled forward a few steps, five or six or so...

It was - as it is for every parent - an amazing, life-affirming, easily-eclipsing-the-north-rim-of-the-Grand-Canyon sight, but I still felt a twinge of regret as I thought this was the end of the extremely cute 'crawling-only' phase...! Watching him bomb around on his hands and knees was always funny, and sweet to watch (see below). We don't spend long enough crawling, frankly.

Here is Liam, having mastered walking, outside our street with what was known as the 'loopwagen' (literally 'walking car', and pronounced 'lope-var-gkun' - something like that anyway). Oh, how the car drivers bombing down this shortcut to town loved to wait for him to cross the road...

Liam in Rotterdam - 2

Liam understood what the economist Schumpeter was getting at from a very early age: he was very much an advocate of 'creative destruction', as demonstrated here by the gusto with which he set about modifying the structure of this pop-up book!

Liam in Rotterdam - 1

Liam spent his first 18 months living in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands.

He was a hilarious baby, ludicrously active and impatient with things - not one of those babies whom you could give a scrunched-up ball of coloured paper to keep them occupied for hours... When we visited other people's houses, he would charge around, to the bewilderment of other kids. Maybe Dutch kids are just more mellow...?!

Here he is in what is called in Dutch the 'kinderbox' (literally "child's cage" - kidding!) We could put him in there and he would sit among all the toys and amuse himself by piling them high on the edges and pushing them off onto the floor. The big fluffy dog drooped over the edge was bought for us by my boss at Erasmus Universiteit, but Liam never particularly took to it.

Liam is born

Our son, Liam Thomas, was born, 17 days late, on 15th June 2003, in the St Franciscus hospital, Rotterdam. Here he is with Mum and Nonna in hospital, only two days old.

It was a difficult birth for Valeria by emergency caesarean, during which she lost half her blood. Happily, Liam came out healthy (and Mum recovered in time), and the first thing he did was rip the oxygen tubes out of his Mum's nose. Should have taken it as a warning...! (Kidding.)

We got him home to our house, after a week in hospital. The Dutch system arranges for a professional carer to come to your house for a few hours each day in the first week to look after the new baby, including supervising bath-times (pictured above), but they also - get ready for this - clean the house. You have to pay for this service upfront, and it's not cheap, but you claim all the money back from your compulsory insurance. All very Keynesian.










These two pictures of him asleep were taken ostensibly to provide his beleaguered and catatonic parents with actual documentary evidence that he could sleep, and therefore could do so again!

The first six months were horrendous for sleeplessness. Liam would wake up every two hours or so, day and night. 'Course, on this occasion the flash on Dad's camera woke him up - how naive could I have been?!

There were times when I would come home from work during the day, to relieve Valeria so she coudl sleep. I'd take Liam out in the pram or, if I had loads of work on, sneaked him in to my office, and hoped he wouldn't wake up.

We tried everything to get Liam off to sleep. In desperation one time in that first week home, as Liam lay shrieking like a banshee in my arms, I remembered that lullabies worked, and so I started singing 'Your love is the place where I come from', by the very marvellous Teenage Fanclub (have a listen here). No special reason, it was just our favourite song during Valeria's pregnancy, and we had been playing it a lot. Well, Liam stopped screaming instantly, and looked up at me with an inquisitive expression that seemed to say, "where have I heard this before?!" He must have heard it in the womb: our son, already into Teenage Fanclub, and not yet a month old. I was very proud. It wasn't a one-off either, the soothing power of Teenage Fanclub worked almost every time!

Rotterdam (June 2002 - December 2004)

I had always wanted to live and work in the Netherlands - though not for the usual reasons cited by Englishmen of my age. Perhaps alone among my countrymen, I was attracted to Holland by its system of statutory works councils, and its integrated transport system. (And the bars were great, of course.)

Valeria did not need much persuading. She too had grown a bit fed up with the fast pace and chaos of London, and in any case had already left Rome for London so this kind of upheaval was not new to her. So, when in April 2000 she flew out to Rotterdam to meet me after a conference, we stayed on to see whether the prospect of living in the city appealed to us both. Weirdly, during our wanderings that weekend, we ended up in the Kralingen district at the lovely Kralingse bos park, and we thought to ourselves, "if we did come, wouldn't it be great to live around here?" Three years later we had bought a flat five streets down from where we had that conversation (pictured)...

I had wooed Professor Jaap Paauwe at Erasmus Universiteit to invite me to apply for a job as a post-doctoral researcher with his department. The interview was on September 11th - that September 11th - and began as the first plane hit, lasted two hours, after which I went into a bar for a beer to reflect on how the interview had gone, then caught a 20-minute tram to the station, an hour-long train back to Schiphol airport, from where I called Valeria in London. She told me that two planes had been flown into the World Trade Centers and both buildings had collapsed. My exact words in reply: "Darling, I'm sure there's a rational explanation...!"

I got the job, and straight after getting married we moved to Rotterdam. We loved living there, our son Liam was born there (see elsewhere), and we thought we would stay forever, so we bought a flat on a street called Karmelweg in Kralingen (pictured - I think you can also look around our street by typing our postcode, 3061KG, into the 'funda wonen' section of this website, then hitting 'zoeken' [means: search] then clicking on the property that comes up, and clicking on 'buurt'...) In all our time there we never quite got the hang of the correct pronunciation of Karmelweg: was it KARmelweg, or KarMELweg?! We were a pain in the arse for pizza delivery firms... We still own the flat and we are renting it out until we can sell it.

Rotterdam is an excellent city. It's not picturesque like Amsterdam or Delft, but then it was completely destroyed by Nazi bombs in World War Two (after the mayor surrendered). Since then the city has rebuilt itself spectacularly, with some fantastic-looking modern architecture. The pictures here are of the city's iconic Erasmus bridge by day and at night, which was, and is, a fantastic sight every single time. The other picture is of the famous cube houses near Blaak metro station.

Rotterdam has a 'proper city' feel to it, with loads going on in art and music. The council put on free music festivals in its parks all summer (pop/rock, dance, classical), plus free outdoor cinema... But in the midst of the bustle of it all (a good bustle, too; nothing like as maddening as the bustle of London) we knew we were only a 15-minute bike ride away from canals in the countryside.

We loved Dutch life - well, most of it. The best bits were cycling everywhere (with Liam in a baby seat on the front of Valeria's bike); the trams (so prompt, as Valeria's Dad sad, you could cook pasta according to their appearances in the street); the subtitled not dubbed cinema and TV (which meant we could understand it and pick up some Dutch words at the same time); the yummy breads and pancakes, and the 'Turkish pizzas'; the great beers (mostly from Belgium, mind); the fact that the Dutch government paid a quarter of our mortgage (!) and, most of all, the great friends we made... We still miss 'em all.

But the permanent job I was promised at Erasmus University never materialised - long, not very happy story - so we had to move. We tried to find a way of staying in the Netherlands. I went for a job at Nijmegen, a long commute from Rotterdam, and we looked at jobs at the University of Amsterdam, but really a chapter was coming to a close. When I saw the advert for a position at Durham Business School, immediately it felt like the right move. I got it, and our two and a half years as Rotterdammers came to an end.

Thinking about it now, having to leave was probably for the best. We had followed through on our ambition to live over there, instead of leaving it as a dream. But Erasmus Universiteit is not a conducive place to work for a foreigner (its senior leadership has a brutish approach to people management, and I would never have been given access to the development opportunities and - let's not be coy - additional income streams available to Dutch academics), and so the work situation would never have improved. Only one of my former colleagues still works there, just 18 months on from my departure. Plus, Liam would have gone to a local State school and probably been at a disadvantage in language terms. So, just before his language proficiency kicked in, we moved back to England where he would learn a local language his parents are passably competent in!

The fact that Liam is 'a Rotterdammer' means that we will always have a connection with the city, even if our friends there should move out, and that means we will always return regularly. We wonder what connection he will have with his hometown as he grows up...?