First tentative steps.

This is it! I am inspired!
I guess I'm just one in a long long row, of course.
How did I get here?

Two words (or one name) : Petite Anglaise.

Sure, I had heard about blogs before. I'd never read one though, and to be honest, -please don't get upset with me now!- I thought it was something for weird computer geeks. I had this image of a virtual world, where people were acting out their fantasy lives, alter egos, you name it... through their blogs.

Being a bit of a book worm, I picked up "Petite Anglaise", the book, during my last hunt for my evening reading fix. I'm still reading it, as well as now having found the way to Petite Anglaise's blog.
In fact, I feel a little like a ball in a table tennis game; one moment I'm reading the book, greedily turning page after page; the next I'm scouring through Petite's archives, matching the book's events to the actual blog, whilst sneakily getting ahead, peeking at some of the newer posts.

I'm sure many women in their thirties, like Petite and myself, will recognise a lot of the situations and feelings she describes in her book and blog, however, I feel I have a sort of special kinship.
Not only am I the same age, I also find myself in a new country. I too, have a little girl, only difference being that mine isn't a tadpole, but a little haggis (topped with mayonnaise for that bit of Belgian-ness). The father-haggis is also not any longer in my life as a partner/husband, and a lot of water has flown under the bridge since.

My arrival in Scotland came about in quite a different way to Petite's move to France, but that is not of great importance. (If anyone does stumble upon this, and would like to know more, I could tell you the story of how this cunning Scotsman came and tempted me away from my lovely native Bruges...)
Looking at both our lives today, there are a lot of parallel lines, lived out on the two different sides of the Channel.

So, to get back on track, here I am. This might never be read by another pair of eyes, who knows?
The reason for writing here, is that at least there is a box to post my ramblings. I often write little bits, which invariably get deleted right before I can hit the save button. It seemed pointless to clog up the hard drive with things that I'd never show to anyone anyway.

My native language is Dutch as I am originally from the Flemish North of Belgium. I came to live in Scotland in April of 1998, already armed with a good basic knowledge of the English language.
I must admit though, that even now, after 11 years, I still don't consider myself fluent, or at least not quite as fluent as I'd like to be. Unlike Petite, I have not kept on speaking my native language on a daily basis (to my great embarrassment, I have to admit that my little haggis is not bi-lingual at all) and so I find myself stuck somewhere in the nowhere land between two languages.

I hear people speaking my native Dutch and feel strangely detached, it almost sounds alien, yet at the same time I can't quite master the subtle emotional nuances that are contained in the English language.

Of course when I first came here, my knowledge of English was more or less purely technical, and often my use of it lead to hilarious situations at the workplace. You could hedge your bets on it that someone would pick up on the slightest thing that could be turned into an innuendo, and then milk it for all it was worth.

My plan now? I will use this blog as a sort of notebook. You might find a recalled memory. Maybe I'll end up writing a bit about my everyday life. Or it could be that I post something of an observation, some thoughts, probably things as seen from a foreigner's point of view in this beautiful country I've come to live in.

I'm really curious to find out how the rest of this works, so I am going to hit the "PUBLISH POST" button...

Until the next time?