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‘It took me 10 years to learn Dutch – but language is only a small part of communicating’

10 questions   Photo: Malcolm Mason private collection Malcom Mason, 82, used to visit Amsterdam on leave from the RAF in the 1960s. Now living in Nunspeet, he retired this year as chairman of the Amsterdam branch of the Royal Air Force Association after 40 years involvement with the club. He learned Dutch from Linguaphone records, has adopted the scruffy Dutch way of dressing and says he would be gobsmacked if he was told he had to go back to Britain. How did you end up in the Netherlands? I joined the Royal Air Force as a young lad of 16 and when I had completed my apprenticeship trainin...

Life as an ex-expat Two years on and now loving my UK life, I realise that those first few months I was experiencing the phenomenon of ‘reverse culture shock’. I read up on the little-known topic and discovered that experts say that like expatriation, repatriation has its psychological phases, almost like a grieving process, that come as a surprise. It certainly did for me. It’s not just feelings of loneliness and homesickness for your foreign experiences that cause a disassociation with ‘home’, it’s the daily practices of your home country that you become out of touch with. Ex-ex...

March 17, 2021 Mark Rutte and the right-wing VVD won a narrow victory in the DutchNews.nl election poll, picking up 21.6% of the potential international worker vote – and almost doubling their support from the previous DN poll in 2018. GroenLinks and D66 were in joint second place, with just under 20% support, while newcomers Volt and BIJ1 were in fourth and fifth place, with 7.1% and 6.2% support, respectively. Geert Wilders’ far right PVV managed just 5.3% support in the DutchNews.nl poll, compared with an estimated 10% in the real general election while Thierry Baudet’s Forum voor...

Out of the box: deposits would be the solution for cardboard chaos