My school run past the World Forum

Dear friends and family, I am currently putting together my next update to you all, but as I’ve been doing this since November 2013 (it’s now a monster, with all that’s been going on) and I’ve still not quite tweaked it and finished it, I have decided, in the meantime, to resort to blipfoto and post daily pics of our life here. I often see and experience things over here and I think, ‘I must tell everyone at home about this’ and yet I haven’t done that! So, just to keep you all posted, blipfoto it will be for a while. Here is the first…..

This view is on my school run and I drive past this four times a day - the flags of the United Nations outside the World Forum (plus, at this time of year, some beautiful spring flowers into the bargain!). However, last week this journey was impossible for us to make. For those of you who didn’t know, The Hague recently hosted the Nuclear Security Summit and a bevy of world leaders attended, Obama and the rest of the G7 included. For residents of The Hague and elsewhere, it meant shutdown: most main roads approaching the city from as far away as Amsterdam were closed for up to four days and the centre of town was heavily militarised/defended/security ‘camerad’/generally closed to citizens! For those of us in Wassenaar, every road into The Hague was closed (imagine living in Cobham and both the A3 and M25 are shut - that extent of road closure). The cavalcade of big black cars also passed the main road at the bottom of our street and so we had tanks, soldiers in tents, army HGVs and large articulated trucks blocking the way onto the dual carriageway (I kid you not - see earlier blipfoto posting). And to top it all off, for two or three days, we also had incessant helicopter traffic over the city from about 7am until 11.30pm. All in all, it was quite exciting and I really felt we were in the midst of something important - but I’m not sure the rest of world was too aware of it (and despite all of these efforts, I don’t think the summit fully achieved its aims anyway!!)