I’ve always been irritated by Dutch bands singing in English and wonder if I’m being slightly irrational.

As soon as I hear a Dutch band singing in English I’ll be trying to find the mistakes. I think this is a way for me to justify my irritation but, if I’m honest the irritation always arises before I’ve even discovered any errors.

So a while back on De Wereld Draait Door a Dutch band started singing ‘Call me down to Ohio’ and there I was irritated and trying to find errors in that order.

This song gave me plenty of ammunition. Why would someone be calling the singer down to Ohio if he was here in the Netherlands? And if it’s down to Ohio that would imply he was in the States already somewhere north of Ohio rather than across the Atlantic Ocean in a place that would involve getting on a plane and flying over to Ohio and a longer journey rather than just going down to Ohio in the way that you’d go down to Leiden if you lived in Amsterdam.

And even then, do you ever call someone down to somewhere?

So I turned into a whirlwind of grammar and unleashed my wrath on Husband. ‘It’s so nep,’ I said.

It’s secondhand experiences regurgitated using constructions that don’t even make sense. Why is a Dutch group singing about being called down to Ohio, if we leave aside the grammatical correctness of whether you do actually call someone down to somewhere, as if it’s a common thing?

‘Oh sorry, I can’t come to your circle of doom. I’ve just been called down to Ohio’

‘We were called down to Ohio for our last avondvierdaagse. Where did you go?’

‘Where’s your schoolreisje this year? We’ve been called down to Ohio.’

Why can’t they just sing about being called down to Twello or Welp* and do it in Dutch instead?

Then husband said something odd. If I was a Dutch band writing lyrics I would say he hit a curveball, because that’s American and therefore a desirable phrase and it’s kant en klaar and ready to go. Ooh there’s another kant en klaar phrase. As is kant en klaar.

Husband’s curveball was the enigmatic ‘I could have written it’. He then went on to explain about his ex-girlfriend – of whose existence I was aware – did an exchange programme at Columbus, Ohio. So he did spend a year calling and visiting Ohio, although I don’t know if she ever called him down to Ohio.

This had me harrumphing a bit. ‘But it’s not a general experience of Dutch people, being called down to Ohio,’ I said.

So why does Dutch groups singing in English rile me so much that they have me looking for grammatical errors just to justify my getting riled?

I think there’s probably a bit of jealousy because they generally manage to produce reasonable English. But I think it’s more because it seems to be a cynical desire to break into the international market rather than produce anything remarkable, as in ‘Let’s sing about Ohio. Then we’ll get airtime in the States’.

I want the words and the music to come together and have something to say.

If it’s a Dutch band singing in English the song is more likely to be full of platitudes (probably things about fly, high in the sky or wings and sings). I realise a lot of native-speaker English lyrics rely heavily on platitudes too, but the chance is greater with the native Dutch speakers because their English vocabulary is likely to be smaller than that of a native speaker. That’s why I write in English rather than Dutch: I have a much wider range in English than I do in Dutch. If I tried to write a song in Dutch I’d get as far as zij/mij/hij and then get stuck with what to rhyme with avondvierdaagse.

It’s possibly also about an inferiority complex about Dutch in the vein of Dutch is too ugly to be able to create poetry, Dutch has a much more meagre vocabulary than English or Dutch is uncool and truttig. None of which I agree with apart from the uncool and truttig because that’s what I am, so I can’t judge it.

But even if the English language did have a larger vocabulary than the Dutch language, the Dutch person would probably have a smaller English vocabulary than their Dutch one.

I’m wondering if rap is a medium in which Dutch artists are more likely to use Dutch, because you need to be fast and creative in a way that is difficult in a language that isn’t your mother tongue. My knowledge of Dutch rap is more or less limited to Gers Pardoel, who, judging by the fact that his songs are played all the time on the radio, is mainstream and commercial, so I don’t know whether I’m right here.

The point is, however, that his song Bagagedrager is very Dutch in a way singing about Ohio isn’t, because it’s all about jumping on his bike for a backie (it’s only kids that would do that in Britain at least). However, it’s  universal too because in the end it’s all about love.

* this is for Harriet

I have made two recent discoveries, the first of which I should have known about a long time ago: gestampte muisjes. How could I have missed a product the name of which translates as crushed mice? And, more importantly, how could I have missed the sheer deliciousness of gestampte muisjes on buttered toast? (Although I realise buttered toast is more British than Dutch).

The second discovery is Ethel Smith and her Hammond organ version of Tico Tico. I keep playing it in the kitchen in the hope that one of the kids will magically whirl off a version on our new keyboard while the rest of us stand around rattling tambourines and grinning. So far I’ve got the grinning down to a tee, but Son has started saying ‘oh no not the Tico Tico’ whenever I put it on, so I’ve a feeling I might be a bit deluded here.

These two discoveries have gelled into a new idea: the welcome pack for new immigrants. I’m envisaging a ceremony in which Rutte dashes off a rendition of Tico Tico on a Hammond organ surrounded by a grinning Cabinet as new immigrants file by to receive their welcome pack. I can imagine Wilders wanting to participate too, although I don’t think we’ll let him decide on the contents of the welcome pack.

The welcome pack would be a bit like the babydoos that shops like Kruidvat and Prenatal offer when you’re pregnant but better because in my experience you imagine they will be full of fantastic presents but end up with a single sample of baby bath, some sudocream and that’s about it.

If I were in charge of the immigrant welcome pack it would certainly include gestampte muisjes, oude kaas, a promise of ice and a pair of ice skates, a bike, music by Herman van Veen and Ramses Shaffy, a trip to the Mauritshuis, the children’s programme Klokhuis, a bowl of snert, a sûkerbôle, terrasweer and a copy of Pluk van de Petteflet.

Any other suggestions?

It struck me this weekend that integration is something you dip in and out of. I know that politicians and the media talk about integration as if it’s a race you have run, a hill you have climbed, an exam you have sat, but this isn’t my experience. For me integration depends on the company and circumstances in which I find myself.

On Saturday we went skating with a group of friends. Husband was the only autochtoon in the group. The kids present were bilingual if not trilingual.

We could have been a multicultural hell for anti-immigrationists but redeemed ourselves as we ventured onto the ice to skate alongside the Dutch people from the local ijsvereninging.

If that moment was the integration test we would pass.

However, this was just a snapshot, and we all experience different moments and forms of integration rather than a continuous integration.

The ice represents the ideal circumstances for integration. You don’t need to speak the language to ice skate. You’re entering a place that is before language and beyond nationality.

Yes you can talk about gekluun, the tocht that shall not be mentioned or koek en zopie, but you can stay silent. Silence is the essence of skating fever. The fever is about entering the trance where all that matters is the repetition of movements and the sound of your skates on the ice. Right, left, right, left. Swish, swish, swish.

Ice skating is conducive to integration in a way that, say, the World Cup isn’t. The World Cup is a peak of unintegration because being Dutch is the main factor of belonging to the group. The focus is nationality, whereas on the ice nationality is irrelevant.

I have a bit of thing about jutters (beachcombers or wreckers). We’ve got Reade Jutter (red beachcomber) cheese in the fridge, I’ve read Sil de Strandjutter and have even sat through the first two episodes of Dr Deen just because it is on Vlieland, has Monique van de Ven in it (Lobke in the TV series of Sil de Strandjutter) and had some scenes of mild jutting in the first episode. The fact that it is isn’t that good and is on the TV station that is “Dé omroep voor 50-plussers” is of minor importance here.

The word jutten possibly comes from the word Jut, as in an inhabitant of Jutland, and was originally used in a derogatory fashion. In this respect the Jutten were the MOE-landers of the nineteenth century.

Whether a jutter is a beachcomber or a wrecker depends on how you are using the word. The way jutter is used nowadays is probably more similar to how beachcomber is used nowadays (I’ve discovered that a beachcomber was originally “a white man living as a drifter or loafer especially on the islands of the South Pacific” rather than someone that looks for things that wash up on the beach).

In the past a jutter would have been the equivalent of a wrecker. There are lots of stories of Cornish wreckers in the UK. I’d always thought that a wrecker caused shipwrecks but have found out that this is probably a myth. Wrecking was more about salvaging what washed up from a shipwreck than actually causing a shipwreck. However, like a jutter a wrecker was originally viewed in a negative light.

For me, this fascination with jutters is a continuation of the stories that have decorated my world since I was a child. It’s therefore a new peg to hang this part of my experience upon. It probably started with Captain Pugwash and adventure stories such as the Famous Five that features smugglers or pirates.

When I was a bit older I read Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier and was thrilled to see the real Jamaica Inn as we drove past on our many trips to Cornwall. Then there was the book and film of A High Wind in Jamaica about children being captured by pirates as they travelled from Jamaica to the UK and the shock when one or all of the pirates was sentenced to hang at the end (if I remember rightly).

We used to spend a lot of time in Cornwall where there’s a whole history of wreckers, smugglers and shipwrecks. We’ve spent plenty a rainy afternoon in museums looking at finds from shipwrecks, and have actually hunted for treasure at Beady Pool on St Agnes, one of the Scilly Isles, where you used to be able to find beads from a ship that sunk in the seventeenth century.

The good thing about living in the Netherlands is that it gives me new fodder for these stories. There are new islands – the Waddeneilanden –  new wrecks – the Lutine, a French ship that had been captured by the British Navy and sank off Vlieland in 1799 as it took bullion and coins to Germany and new stories – Sil de Strandjutter, De scheepsjongens van Bontekoe, the film of which Son watched part of this week and the book of which I’ll have to try and get a copy of (for my sake as much as his).

As well as providing new material, being in the Netherlands also allows me to look at the old stories of pirates, wrecking smuggling and shipfaring from a different angle, because there often turns out to be a Dutch element to them that I wouldn’t have noticed before. So a Dutch ship is significant in A High Wind in Jamaica and the ship carrying the beads that sunk off of St Agnes was Dutch.

I’ve realised I am actually married to a jutter, a modern-day one whose jutting ground is charity shops rather than on the beach. His latest find is a sjoelbak to take to my brother the next time we go to the UK.

In the last few days with ice as the main topic of conversation I’ve noticed that in Dutch you speak of ice growing as if it were a living organism. At first I thought this was a Dutch thing but have since discovered that you say it in English too and have realised that my problem isn’t simply a lacking ice vocabulary in Dutch but a lacking ice vocabulary in English too.

The description here of how ice grows would also be apt for language acquisition or how a language grows in us:  ’when an ice film is extremely thin, just a nanometer thick (40 millionths of an inch), the water molecules form small, tabular (flat) islands of crystalline ice on the platinum surface. Once it thickens to four or five nanometers, the ice islands link to form a continuous film of ice.’

We certainly begin with small islands of language – individual words – which, as we become more proficient in the language, link to form a continuous film of language. Language is obviously more malleable than ice, so we can continually forge different links between different words. Furthermore, there are always new ice islands that join on to our existing film of language, an example of which is my growing ice vocabulary.

In the interests of sharing, here’s the latest additions to my ice vocabulary. This weekend I learnt the word wak, which is a hole in the ice or thin ice both of which have occurred naturally. Windwak, which is thin ice caused by the wind, has had a lot of mention on the news. Windwak is bad.

Then there’s a bijt, which is a hole cut in the ice, such as those made for fishing. I wonder whether I could say the man who appeared on the ice on Saturday and proceeded to drill a hole in it to measure the thickness – 12cm – was making a bijt or whether a bijt has to be bigger than that.

Obviously Elfstedentocht was one of the first words I learnt in Dutch, but now I can name the winner of one tocht at least: Reinier Paping in 1963. However, Husband can name lots of other winners too, so I need to do better in this area.

Then there were the Rayonhoofden who met this weekend to discuss the ice. Although I wasn’t quite sure what a Rayonhoofd was (it sounds a bit like district managers meeting to discuss thinking out of the box), I realised that them meeting is significant because it’s a step closer to there being a tocht.

I have since discovered on the Elfstedentocht site that the route is divided into 22 districts, rayons, and there is a Rayonhoofd, a director or manager of each district, who is responsible for the route in his/her district and probably talks about wak a lot.

On the news they discussed how much work still needed to be done to the ice to make the route skateable. I had no idea you could do work to ice to make it skateable until Husband mentioned ijstransplantatie, ice transplantation. This, apparently, is using sections of ice from elsewhere to fill or reinforce a wak. I thought he was having me on but discovered on this, rather abrasive to the eyes, site that it does actually exist.

Then there’s the words everyone is waiting to hear: it giet oan, Frisian for it’s on, as in the Elfstedentocht is on. Apparently it giet oan is starting to be used in other contexts as well.

And so the ice islands continue to form and begin to link to my existing film of language and my vocabulary grows. Let me know if you have any useful islands of ice vocabulary to add to the pot.

I picked up a leaflet from the library the other day about bilingualism. It was called ‘Talen kleuren je leven. Meertalig opvoeden.’ (Languages colour your life. Bringing up bilingual children) and is produced by Afûk (snigger), a foundation for the promotion of the Frisian language.

The leaflet is consequently all about the benefits of bilingualism and the miracles it can work: children who always do as you say, never argue, fetch your slippers and can read the complete works of Shakespeare at the age of 3-and-a-half. I’m just completing the money-back request for my kids.

On a more serious note, I felt all self-congratulatory about having bilingual children before I realised that this celebration of bilingualism is always at the expense of monolingualism, so instead of seeing each as having its advantages and disadvantages or instead of seeing it as all as different gradations on a scale, it is pitting them against each other and, as this leaflet is promoting bilingualism, letting bilingualism win.

We’re lucky that bilingualism is currently seen as ‘a good thing’. The only problem I have with this is that it is like with clothes you have always worn that suddenly become in fashion. It’s a novel experience to be in fashion for once but is bitter-sweet because you know that next season you’re going to out of fashion again and, even worse, you’re going to look like you tried to be in fashion last season but haven’t realised you’re out of fashion now.

If I look at past generations, bilingualism was seen as a bad thing, so it’s just as likely that bilingualism, like platform shoes, is going to fall out of favour again.

And once it’s fallen out of favour, where does that leave those of us who do it because that’s what we do rather than because we have read all the research on bilingualism and decided it’s ‘better’ than monolingualism? This is the crux of it really: it is turned into another choice you have to make like having to choose which health insurer you want and, to be topical, where you want to have your wisdom teeth taken out.

The problem I have with this (and I don’t want to have to choose a different dentist for each individual procedure anyway) is that you don’t choose to bring your children up as bilinguals because of so-called benefits: you do it because you wouldn’t do it otherwise. It’s just what you do and you’re glad if there are benefits.

At the hairdressers the other day we worked out that the children have a moedertaal and a vadertaal. I think this is the best way of seeing it. It is just a facet of their upbringing that has its advantages and disadvantages rather than something that is better than anything else. Yes the kids have known from a young age that there are different languages but they are also a bit of an oddity at school and in public, which means they have to get used to being stared at when we speak English. That’s just how it is.

Some children from school live on farms and get to rush around in clogs but don’t go on holiday very often. Everything has its advantages and disadvantages.

I’ve been wondering if there are universal recipient and universal donor cuisines just like there are universal recipient and universal donor blood groups.

Are there national cuisines that everyone likes regardless of where they come from – universal donor cuisines – and national cuisines that only those coming  from that country itself like – universal recipient cuisines?

I say this because French food is generally considered to be the best thing since sliced bread – although I wonder if that is a Euro-centric view – whereas British and Dutch food are generally reviled by all those apart from the British and Dutch themselves.

And it’s not even as if we universal recipient cultures stick together either: the British and Dutch like to mock each other’s food like they mock each other’s weather because although we know it’s useless to try and compete with, say, the French in terms of cuisine and the Spanish, say, in terms of weather, we think we might stand a chance of beating each other in terms of slightly less crappy weather and food.

There was an article in the Guardian the other day about British food, which is worth reading more for the comments than for the article itself. The article is a reaction to two studies: one showing that the British eat the fewest vegetables in all of Europe and another showing that over half of the meals eaten out in Britain are fast food. (There’s also a great example of a Dutch person bashing the British in the article.)

The problem I find with the article is that the author and many of the commenters are mixing up diet and cuisine. So the British diet might be bad, probably as a result of the influx of fast-food restaurants and processed food, but this doesn’t mean that British cuisine is bad. It’s more that the Second World War had such an impact due to the scarcity of ingredients and that this was followed by an increasing industrialisation of food and people being sold the idea that instant food would save you time and let you do much more fantastic things instead, an idea that still persists.

I think the Netherlands have a similar history and wonder if one of the reasons why British and Dutch cuisine tend to be reviled is because you often get processed versions of traditional recipes and because a lot of traditional cooking has been forgotten.

This is why it makes me glad to see blogs like The Dutch Table in which Nicole makes traditional Dutch food using proper ingredients. The kids and I recently made roze koeken and the latest post is about eierkoeken, which I’ve never understood and have wanted to make myself because the ones you get from the supermarket just seem dry and tasteless.

I wonder if it isn’t so much that one cuisine is a universal recipient and the other a universal donor but that some cuisines just need a bit of reviving and to be given a chance.

We’ve been watching a drama series about the Dutch royal family, Beatrix, Oranje onder vuur, and it’s clear that there are significant gaps in my Dutch history.

I know the basics like Juliana and Bernhard being Beatrix’s parents and Wilhelmina being Juliana’s mother (although I did just check that one to make sure) but what I am missing is the experience of events that happened before I was living here; events I would have experienced if I had grown up here.

What I’m missing therefore is less of a textbook history, although that’s missing too, and more of a experiential history.

It reminds me of those programmes where they talk about your real age as opposed to your chronological age, programmes that generally involve tracksuits, gyms, teeth-whitening and cosmetic fillers.

In terms of experiential Dutch history, my real age is 14. Obviously, this mismatch between chronological age and real Dutch age doesn’t hamper me in daily life. It’s not like I’m always being laughed at or shot because I don’t know who the prime minister was in 1986.  However, it does render one slightly childlike when one hasn’t experienced the same history as ones contemporaries.

Returning to Beatrix, Oranje onder vuur, the actors haven’t been chosen due to an astonishing likeness to the person they are playing, so it’s a guessing game working out who they are supposed to be anyway. I can work out the contemporary figures such as Balkenende, Wilders and Willem Alexander (and gain extra trivia points for knowing that he’s played by Bastian Ragas who used to be in a boy band and is now married to Tooske thingy) but once we go back in time I’m lost.

Husband and my mother-in-law sat through the first episode going ‘is that supposed to be bla bla bla? Oh no it’s bla bla bla’ and a name would occasionally ring a small, distant bell. So we had Lubbers, who I know as a former politician who worked for the UNHCR. It turns out he was prime minister of the Netherlands until 1994, just three years before I was ‘born’ in the Netherlands.

Lubbers being prime minister makes sense in terms of a tradition of prime ministers with comedy names: he was after all followed by Wim Kok. Whether it was a long-standing tradition, which was broken with the advent of the non-comedy-name Balkenende era, is something I’d have to look up.

However integrated I feel, there is always yet another level that I could take my integration to.

Take hanging your duvet out of the window every day. I have done it but only about twice since I’ve been living here.

‘Torrid nights’ is my mum’s pronunciation on it, which confirms my suspicion that ‘we’ don’t do it ‘at home’. Maybe they just have more torrid nights here. Perhaps it’s a sign that you have just had a torrid night… Although it does seem to be the superkeurig people who do it.

Then there’s slavinken. Having had them recently at Oma’s and seeing the kids enjoying them, I suddenly thought, for the first time ever and thus very adventurously, ‘right I’ll buy and cook slavinken; I shall be a slavinken cook’ when out shopping the other day.

Then I discovered a whole slavinken world at the supermarket that I have never noticed before – I think all these supermarket sections, like with kapucijners, only become visible to us when we are just about ready to accept their existence – and it was suddenly too daunting. I decided I would have to do some slavink research first rather than blithely blundering into slavinken world.

I’ve denied the existence of slavinken for so long because the name conjures up such unappetising images: sla is lettuce and vink is a finch. Lettuce Finch sounds like a good name for a character in a book but not like something I would particularly want to eat, and that’s even though we do eat them regularly at Oma’s.

Alternatively, I could take sla to be a form of the verb slaan and it could thus mean ‘bashed finches’, which is coincidentally what we almost witnessed earlier in the week as a sparrowhawk (sperwer) sat on the garden fence tearing at a great tit (koolmees) it had caught, a scheurmees I guess.

My trusty Kookboek van de Amsterdamsche Huishoudschool isn’t any help with slavinken, which is probably because it predates them. The etymology dictionary says slavinken are a culinary invention of the 1950s and are named as such because they taste lekker with salad and resemble a roasted songbird. Hmm.

Which brings me onto another integration level that I still haven’t reached: sla versus salade. In theory, I know that sla is lettuce and salade is the finished product, such as the, after the centuries I have been living here, still very scary huzarensalade – and I’m sure there’s a whole huzarensalade section waiting to reveal itself at the supermarket, but I’m certainly not ready for it yet – but I am still crap at applying this concept in practice when speaking.

So what do I need to work on? More torrid nights, more bashed songbirds and more sla/salade practice.

The year has a certain symmetry to it. It starts with a death, a funeral, the whole family crying round Opa’s grave and Daughter saying ‘Oma, you’ll have to find a new man to live with now.’

It ends with a death, a smaller one this time. Sniffy the hamster is, as Husband says, a stiffy.

Circumstances conspire to have us burying the hamster at the same cemetery as Opa (we’re spending New Year with Oma and can’t leave a dying hamster at home and know there’s no point in calling the caviapolitie, or the hamsterpolitie for that matter, so we bring her with us. She dies during the journey. Oma lives in a flat with no garden in which to bury Sniffy and we’ve not seen Opa’s headstone yet, so Husband makes the macabre suggestion of combining the two).

We walk across the cemetery carrying a bag with flowers for Opa, a trowel and a small box containing Sniffy and the children’s art from when she was lying in state: a picture of a heart by Daughter and a ‘passpoort in de hemel’ by Son with a picture of Sniffy on the front and details inside like naam: Sniffy, leeftijd: 1.5 jaar and pictures of her favourite food.

I realise I’m wearing the same dress as for Opa’s funeral. It feels uncanny as we take the same route to the grave. It’s almost as if time is merging and we’re back to Opa’s funeral.

Husband engages in a bit of wildbegraven and digs a small hole for Sniffy behind Opa’s shiny new headstone. ‘Why can’t we get a headstone for Sniffy?’ daughter asks.

Son, whose  grief for Sniffy when she was on death’s door was the same un-British, un-Dutch wailing as when he heard Opa had died, has now composed himself and says a few words for Sniffy about how he’ll miss her scratching in the morning. ‘Sniffy,’ says Daughter portentously. ‘We will never see you again.’ Then she turns to me and, in another memorable graveside speech, says, ‘Can we get another hamster?’

The grave next to Opa’s is of a man in his twenties; the grave opposite a ten-year-old girl. Opa’s restrained grave with its single plant, our flowers, gravel and simple lettering on his gravestone seems almost brazen in comparison because of the number of years between the dates of birth and death.