17 Oct 2013:
Trip to Belgium to start another year of EFT training.
I arrive at Glasgow airport to find my flight has been cancelled.
Some 20 of us get booked onto an afternoon flight out of Edinburgh
airport. There follows a shambolic shamble around Glasgow airport in
search of the bus that is to take us there.
Eventually, the bus finds us & we're on our way.
It's interesting to compare the two airports: Edinburgh is newer, feels
more like a modern European airport but is also more crowded and lacks the
grungy character of Glasgow. (Why should this surprise me?).
Finally, many hours later than planned we are in the air.
I start volume 22 of Thorgall, the Dutch language graphic novel series
I've been working on for most 10 years now. Hmm... I thought Jolan had
rescued his dad Thorgall and his mom Aricia from the clutches of the
conscienceless Kris van Valnor at the end of the volume 21. What's going on
here? I know that the time-travel device Jolan had stolen from the
Watchers from the far future in order to save his parents might have messed
with the time-lines, but here we are back with Thorgall & Kris hanging out
in that big forbidding castle on the sea where they were in the previous
volume. Is this some kind of flashback? Did I mention that (a)
Thorgall is really a space alien adopted by Vikings as a baby when his
spaceship crashed on medieval Earth, (b) the Gods erased his memory a
couple of volumes ago as part of a deal for them to leave his family alone, and
(c) Kris then took advantage of the situation to shack up with him and to
convince him that he's really Shaigan the Merciless, scourge of the Great
Fjord, which (d) by the way is not sitting particularly well with him?
Sounds like a soap opera, but it's just my Dutch language training
program, an amusingly incongruous mix of high fantasy and science fiction that
has kept me practicing Dutch for almost a decade.
After that, on the plane, it is easy for me to step
into the role of translator between the Dutch flight attendant and the Scots lad
seated next to me: they can barely understand a word of what the other
says, but I can understand everything they say, including her Dutch. (She thinks I'm Dutch because I said when she said, "Do you want a sweet or a savoury snack", I said "Zout", meaning salty, as opposed to zoet, which means sweet.)
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