Wednesday 7 January

Got up earlier than usual, so my father suggested we take a hike to the river. The river is the River IJssel, an offshoot of the river Rhine, flowing north past Deventer, Zwolle and Kampen into Lake IJssel, formerly the Zuiderzee. It's a pretty big body of water. We walked there on the outside of Velp, past Biljoen Castle and across the floodplain to the old stage for the ferry to Lathum, on the eastern bank of the river. We returned through the centre of Velp, a pretty big town of about 20,000. The weather was beautiful, starting out frosty but warming up to some extent by the time we returned home, at midday.

Upon our return, the news came through that twelve people had been killed by two gunmen in Paris. Ten journalists and  two policemen. NOS TV felt it necessary to show us the execution of one policeman - so we knew what it looked like. We don't need to know, thanks. The journalists all worked for a satirical publication called Charlie Hebdo (Charlie's Weekly), which had published some cartoons of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed back in 2006. Now, Muslims do take exception to taking their Prophet being lampooned (like Christians don't particularly like Jesus Christ being lampooned), but there is no justification for this sort of action. #JeSuisCharlie was the hashtag that cropped up as a mark of respect and support.