Happy New Year!

From the place where Mary and Frederik met, it is already 2009! Photo: Craig Greenhill/The Daily Telegraph

It is time to wish you all a Happy New Year! This is the anniversary of our third year, although many a loyal reader might have doubted the blog this year. As I have told many of you who have been kind and concerned and sent emails, this blog is a spare time activity, and real life does get 'in the way' at times. This has definitely been the case this year. We are still catching up back here, the many missing posts about DRF activities will appear eventually and we will let you know about them in a 'Dear readers...' post in the future. We do like to maintain the blog as an English language record of fact as far as possible. Thanks too to readers who have taken us past three million visits and five million page views - it is your interest which motivates our commitment to the blog. Thanks also to the Danish media which allows us to highlight their stories, photos and video/news clips.

As always, there are many friends of the blog to thank who make many things possible. It takes quite a community of people from all over the world to dig up information, links, photos, scans and videos in all sorts of corners, especially in Danish, for those who do not understand the language. A huge thanks go to the efforts of Valentine, jema, cph, Riki, bonsai, FrederikIX, Benedikte, ambiDK, mayflower, Tamriko, Leonie and gudinde. A special thanks must go to Muhler, for lots of stuff, always.

So here's to the New Year! It may be a difficult year for many because of the economic crisis, here is hoping that wise decisions protect us from the worst. Crown Princess Mary's trip to Uganda has shown there are always places where people have very hard lives indeed, and this is not a bad thought on which to end 2008. We should never be blind to the suffering of others, or to the possibility that it is within our capability to do something about it.

...and vale Jørn Utzon, who died a month ago - an enduring link between Australia and Denmark:
Sydney Opera House tributes
The Sydney Morning Herald 'Joern Utzon dead'
Artdaily.org "...The overrun and the scandal it created kept Utzon from building more masterpieces. This, according to Flyvbjerg, is the real cost of the Sydney Opera House..."
New York Times
London Times

Sydney Morning Herald Sydney fireworks gallery
The Daily Telegraph Sydney NYE 2009 gallery