My dear CADS,

Happy New Year to you all! I wish you much good health and happiness for 2022. How are you? I hope that you are all doing well. I had a super family Christmas in Amsterdam where I definitely ‘over drank’ and ‘over ate’ but I loved every minute of it. Are you now doing ‘dry January’ or enduring ‘Veganuary”? None of that in my world. January can be such a long dismal month that I never want to make it worse by depriving myself of the finer things in life. At the time of writing, we are exactly half way through January and I spotted this lovely snowdrop in my front garden. Spring is on its way!! Yippee! Sadly we will not be allowed to meet in person for our January meeting, it will have to be a Zoom call, but I am confident that by February normal order will be restored. Fingers crossed!!

Our November meeting was held at the ROC Mondriaan Hotel School in Den Haag. Our speaker was Liza de Wilde, winner of the national final GNE Awards by Nuffic. Mike Waters has supported this award for several years and was on the award panel. Liza gave us her winning presentation. She was an absolute delight to listen to. Only 16 years old, she spoke about the importance of staying curious, for both young and old, and if we do so, in her opinion, there will be a lot more research and hopefully world problems will have a better chance of being solved. We were all very impressed by her speech about ‘curiosity’ and we had a lively discussion afterwards.
The 2022 edition of the GNE Awards by Nuffic is already planned. Information about this speaking and writing competition in English can be found on the website www.gneawards.nl.