On The Move

Experimented a little taking photos from the car as we travelled back down the road from Dundee having been up there to see my mum and dad. Trying to see if I could capture something of the idea of the journey. Liked this one as it features West Lomond, the highest hill in Fife at 522m and a familiar landmark on journeys between Dundee and Edinburgh over the years. I often wondered just how good the view would be from the top so I was pleased when L and I eventually walked up it one summer. (I've just looked at the pictures - it was just over nine years ago!) And the views are indeed excellent.
Today is the day when Warsaw stops for a minute to remember the start of the Uprising - seventy years ago today. On the way to Dundee it occurred to me that my parents had been in the same house for forty years this summer. When they moved in the Warsaw Uprising was ten years closer than that moving date now is to today (if that makes sense). Europe has come a long way.
We talked about family holidays to Denmark in the late 1960s/early 1970s when the Danes, not surprisingly, still had something of an attitude towards German visitors. My father was sometimes mistaken for a German but time and again when Danes found out he was English their mood changed from curt politeness to warm welcome. And rather than blanking his attempts to communicate in German they spoke back. Similar to my experience in Prague, when I visited with M and she attempted to ask people on the street for directions in Russian. A language taught in schools but not one to be spoken if you could avoid it in Iron Curtain Czechoslovakia so she was met only with blank stares.
My father also told a story of his student days at the LSE when a group of Russians paid the hall where he stayed a visit, along with their interpreter. She asked if there were any questions and one of the Hungarian students staying in the hall asked, "Who fired first?" After an initial pause as the interpreter worked out what the question was about, (the Hungarian Uprising of 1956) she said it was the insurgents, the protesters. The student persisted. "How did she know?" "It was in the papers. It had to be true." At which point the student stood up, angry. "No, it wasn't. I know. I was there, with a gun in my hand." He had to be led out of the room before he started fighting. To my father, a first-year student from a quiet Sussex village, this was dramatic taste of European politics.