Popping Out For A Quick Note

Some days I want to strangle every single bureaucrat with their own red tape.

For a while now I’ve been trying to find a way to get out of my contract with Foxtons, who I’ve in the process found out have the worst reputation of any large real estate agency in London. So sayeth the internet, anyway.

When I got this flat all the way back in October last year it was after an exhausting and writing-time-consuming search that had been going on entirely too long. I was being called out of class, was up until 2am looking through classifieds of places that had been taken by the time I enquired, and wasting whole days on fruitless viewings. When this place in Ealing finally arrived it was my third choice of the day, the other two having been sold literally hours before I called. It was more expensive than I would have liked, but I was tired of the race and when my dad told me to just take it, damn the consequences, I did.

Within 48 hours I’d moved in. I arrived at the Ealing Foxtons branch with all my bags late at night, after a long day at the LFS. A contract was placed in front of me, and I was encouraged to scan through it briefly, the negotiator watching and waiting with baited breath, and then sign. Which I did. Then, after Foxtons refused to help with the bags, I carted them up the hill to the flat on Corfton Road for a good twenty minutes, and crashed. For the next few days I was fishing clothes tags out of the cupboards and finding lipstick under the radiator. There was a leak in the kitchen and for weeks afterwards I coped with only half the lights operable. I still haven’t been able to identify all the stains on the bathroom tiles.

All this backstory may read as an excuse. But it’s really not. The Foxtons people told me quite simply (and falsely, as it turns out) that the landlord would not accept a six month break clause. If I demanded one, they said, he’d opt for someone more amenable to place in the flat. Now this has come to bite me on the behind because officially my contract goes to halfway through October. And why do I want to leave scenic Ealing before then? Well, besides the fact that it takes an age to get anywhere (if you oversleep for ten minutes you’re late by an hour, basically) and that spending day upon day alone in the suburban silence is making me go stir-crazy, I want to do the proper young professional thing and go flatting in stereo.

Paul and I have been planning to both work and flat together for a while now, and recently the shared living idea has been taken up by two more of our class. The advantage of a group of four or so is that you’ll get much better places for prices per person that would get you something dank and small on your own. With house prices dropping all over London due to the fabled credit crunch and students moving out after the end of term, the next few months will be the best time to do it.

If, that is, I can move before mid-October. But with harpies like Foxtons involved, the only way to do that may be to have the two places at once, at least for a while. Unless I set up a meth lab here on Corfton Road and recoup some of the extraneous losses that way. Nobody would expect. Not in Ealing, where nothing happens.

To end on a bright note, I recently saw Lift To The Scaffold, a late-fifties tragic dissertation on the ever-widening circles of misfortune, where an office worker shoots his employer in order to run off with the man’s wife, only to find a small mistake affecting not only his but many other lives. A perfectly polished puzzle, everything fits together in a way that is inevitable and yet surprising.

All Buses Come At Once

Once again - apologies for the lack of updates. The reason is what it has always been - there’s simply too much writing to be done that I’m being marked on to leave much time for my blog, which I’m only being marked on by that niggling guilty feeling at the back of my brain.

On Saturday I had a date. Yes, I don’t quite believe it either. But it was a far better experience than Valentine’s Day - which ended on a note of utterly unromantic civility. Then we went and saw There Will Be Blood. This time around it was the equally cerebral Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, which had attained Von Trier like levels of realism by the time Harrison Ford climbs into a fridge to survive a nuclear blast, and just went up from there. After the movie we - just to clarify: my current date is not the same one as in February - went for dinner and talked for so long that the Underground closed at one in the morning without us on it. Instead of braving the night bus we stayed in Soho all through the night, drinking coffee outside 24 hour cafes and sharing body warmth,  and I didn’t get into bed until 8:30am. Can only be a good sign, yes?

Up at three in the afternoon to spend that same afternoon at the Camden Green Fair with Paul and Lizzi. It was in Regent’s Park, where I haven’t been since my desperate search for accomodation last year. We were greeted by funky alternative rock from the stage and the unmistakeable (to Lizzi, anyway; she picked it up far earlier than I, which might be cause for concern) smell of grass. Not the kind you play football on, obviously. Guys in flares and glasses danced with girls in floral miniskirts. There was Indian folk dancing and smoothies made in machines that run on pedal power. We watched a documentary on climate change. Lizzi bought a coconut and a hula hoop. I had childhood flashbacks. My summers were spent learning Native American chanting, healing the earth by touching trees (and wandering so far into the forest that I was lost for a whole day - but that’s a different story) and struggling with my first tentative boners at a nudist camp in the south of France. My teenage years too were spent in hippie wild abandon, picking vegetables from communal gardens and representing Amnesty International at the Saturday market.

In a Baker Street pub with Paul afterwards, we discussed the finer points of building ourselves a future after the end of the degree. By this stage of our friendship, collaboration is pretty much a given. Now under discussion is writing a six episode comedy/drama series to send to production companies here in Britain. We’ve had more than a few guest lecturers coming in to tell us that the way into film is through television. And I have no personal aversion to writing for the small screen. In fact, at this point I’ll write anything for anyone who’s willing to pay me. We’re also planning on filming a pilot for use on the internet, as a demo for the BBC to accompany the scripts, and as a short film for festivals. What it’s all about I shan’t divulge here - the internet has ears - but it’s called Counter Culture.

By now my biorhythm was all shot to hell. Even so, Lizzi and Kurt invited Paul and I to That Face on Monday night. A West London (for which read wealthy) mother of two is drinking herself to destruction while fighting with her daughter, who’s at boarding school, and keeping her needy claws in her son, who’s dropped out of school to find himself and take care of her. The man of the house, meanwhile, lives in Asia with his new bride. And that’s basically it. Not Tennessee Williams like the advertising on the outside of the Duke of York’s Theatre claims, but not half bad either for a 19 year old playwright. The casting of the daughter is stilted, emotionless and unfortunate (Lizzi fumed afterwards that she could have done it much better, and she’s not wrong), the Oedipal issues are laid on with a trowel, and there was really no need for the hazing prologue, the presence of the father (who should have remained a Godot figure whose presence was expected with dread throughout the play, giving it some much-needed tension) or even anything outside of the bedroom set and the mother/son/daughter triumverate - but when things got down to brass tacks with those three, and especially with the mother and son, it was good, even approaching excellent.

Full Of Sound And Fury

First of all, and completely unrelated to what will follow, congratuwelldone to Ryan Giggs, Edwin Van Der Sar and all the lads of Manchester United for beating Chelsea in the Champions League final last night. An interest in football is one of a couple of things* I’ve picked up since moving to London. And it isn’t just the footie. In less than a year I’ve experienced so much and changed to such an extent that my lifestyle, if not my life, is barely recognisable when compared to 12 months ago. And what I miss from back home tends to be people, namely my mother and brother, rather than any specific place, event or foodstuff. I’ve more or less become aclimatised to London. Although in this sweltering summer weather the ability to just walk down to the beach in fifteen minutes does sound tempting.

Now, to business.

Last weekend Lizzi and Kurt invited me to a showing of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the reconstructed Globe Theatre on the bank of the Thames, mere steps from where the original stood in Shakespeare’s own time. As actors, they are almost obliged to know and love the Bard, and indeed they do. My own experience with The Greatest Playwright Of All Time™ has not been as consistent. My mother got me a comic book version of several of the classics to introduce my young mind to iambic pentameter. I glanced over the pictures a few times and then put the book aside. Too much, too soon, and the text does lose something in the translation. Later, in an English-speaking High School, we studied Othello and Much Ado About Nothing - the latter a case of truth in advertising, I felt and to some extent still do - and I played a part as well, tights and all. The play was, coincidence has it, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

I got Demetrius, that poor sod, not one of the fairies as I’d hoped. In fact, the role of Puck went to a nimble girl. Though I found nothing funny in Shakey’s convoluted wordplay and messy, uneven narrative structure I threw my all into the performance, tights nothwithstanding. In fact, I remember the lines still (”But you, the murderer, look as bright, as clear, as yonder Venus in her glimmering sphere”) and somehow, from rehearsal to rehearsal, they started to make some degree of sense to me. I was not touched, not moved, certainly not amused, but I could feel the words flowing down my tongue, sense the pace and rhythm Shakespeare had placed in them. In a small way, the Bard did help show me the possibilities of this language, and when As You Like It appeared on my reading list in my first year of university I did not run in terror.

These days I can appreciate the works of Shakespeare as works of art, quite like the relics of the Pharaohs and the frescoes of Giotto. Extraordinary for their time, but that same fickle time has now moved on. Our tastes and techniques have evolved. I look on Shakespeare as a marker in history. His tragedies I can still get emotionally invested in. A film version with Sir Ian McKellen or Dame Judi Dench will keep me in my seat on the strength of their performances and the soliloquies. But the comedies were meant to be funny. And comedy ages faster than anything else. Try looking at Benny Hill these days. Schtick gets old. Jokes lose their relevance. Wordplay grows stale. Shakespeare does not amuse me.

Then came this performance. The star-crossed lovers and rude mechanicals shrieked, capered and flung themselves and each other about as if they were in a French farce. The fairies dressed in tatty ballet gear and carried around balloons and large plastic flowers. Oberon affected a Billy Connoly impression throughout proceedings and Titania was not a sultry and dangerous fairy queen but a saucy East End barkeep who straddled Bottom in a way that left very little to the imagination. Though I thought her moment of strangling her upstart fairy servants telekinetically, a power Oberon shares and uses on Puck, was a nice dark touch to these otherwise not but usually so imposing characters. Puck himself, the star of Dream as Iago is of Othello, was a squat and middle-aged rogue rather than the fey and sly adolescent I have always seen him as.

But no matter. Because though it may not have been high art to some it was simple fun to me. The audience clapped along, laughed, cheered on characters as they rushed on and off stage through their midst. Undoubtedly the fact we were standing for the entire three hours (and as the poorer patrons would have been back in the Elizabethan era), with the actors right in front and at times right beside us got us more invested in proceedings, but I think the whole theatre felt the same thing I did - for the first time in a long time I felt engaged by Shakespeare. For too long it has been ignored that Shakespeare was a populist, an entertainer, the 16th Century equivalent of a Hollywood hack. His plays have been turned into something for interpreters to bleed to death with analysis, old theatre luvvies to hold sacrosanct, and teenagers to suffer through in small print and tight tights.

That is not the way he intended it. What exactly he did intend we may never know entirely (or even whether he wrote the damned things at all or whether his friend and rival Marlowe was responsible; though that’s a whole other story). But I have a feeling it wasn’t too far removed from the show we saw this weekend. Perhaps it is the visceral nature of the theatre experience, perhaps it is the history and power of the place (recreated to the nth degree, even foregoing the use of nails) or perhaps it is just that comedy is best shared whereas tragedy is best seen polished, refined and in close-up. Whatever the reason may be, the fact remains that I went to see Shakespeare, and I was, of all things, entertained.

*As well as an occasional tendency to drink to excess. In fact, these hobbies developed in tandem.

Revenge Of The Quick Notes

There are both advantages and disadvantages to being tall while living in London. On the one hand, your head sticks out above those of the other sardines in the Tube so you’re more easily able to gasp for air. On the other hand, on rainy days everybody’s got their umbrellas out, and the sharp metal things at the edges of them happen to be at eye level.

It’s now suddenly summer, though, so I don’t think (knock wood) that I’ll have this problem in the near future. I wrote the above paragraph more than a week back, never had a chance to finish the entry it belonged to, and now that I finally have a little time to turn away from coursework the sun blazes in the sky, all windows are open and we sleep naked. I still think it an interesting observation, however, and the bigger my entries the better, so it stays in.

The third term has begun. That explains my lethargy when it comes to blogging in one efficient sentence. I’m optimistic about the work ahead, much though there is of it. We’re getting a mentor this term, and specific advice on how to shift into the industry, so although the future outside of the four walls of LFS looms, it isn’t a necessarily threatening prospect. Of course, that may just be my mindless optimism talking.

Two weeks ago ago I saw Kevin Spacey sweating. I had a front row seat and as he and Jeff Goldblum chewed through a script heavy with witticisms and swearwords and masculine one-upmanship his intense performance had me spellbound. He even looked at me during one of the four curtain calls. I’m pretty sure. Elizabeth and I had booked tickets to David Mamet’s Hollywood satire Speed-The-Plow back in February and our long wait was more than handsomely rewarded. Kevin himself somehow sneaked out when we went to get autographs at the stage door afterwards, but I did get Mr Goldblum’s, as well as that of Laura Michelle Kelly, a British musical theatre actress holding her own between these two greats. She just walked out, chatted and had pictures taken, but with Jeff it was a more organised affair. You were led to the stage door in a long line, whereupon he signed whatever it was you had to hand (in some people’s cases their actual hand) through a small window of the kind you see in train stations. One day I too will be succesful and estranged from my fellow man enough to look out at the world through tinted glass.

Michael has completed his mini-epic (really mini; about 13 minutes out of two hours of footage) known as Lobster Vs Killer Whale. We all come off rather well, though there’s always bits you loved on set but weren’t in the edit. I’ll continue to bug him about the raw footage, which he didn’t put on the DVD. I’ll also see if I can find some way to put the flick on Youtube so I can embed it here. It’s been a while since my interview on New Zealand television and you fine readers deserve to see me in action once again.

I didn’t go to that Lord of the Rings all-nighter after all (didn’t mind much, they’re going to show them again and I’ve got the trilogy on DVD anyway) but instead joined Elizabeth at the movies for the bone-chilling The Orphanage which was great despite borrowing a little too liberally in style and content from the superior The Others, and then Paul at a friend’s birthday party which ended up in a club called Heaven (a name with great punning potential) and lasted until the early hours of the morning. I feel all grown up now.

Freak Out In A Moonage Daydream

We’re at De Efteling. One of the oldest theme parks in the world and the epicentre of the nostalgia part of my trip home. It takes us two hours of train and bus to get there from Amsterdam, which means we get into our first ride around noon. There’s no queue for Droomvlucht, a ride past elves and trolls with an abundance of flowers and simulated rain, for the first time in my memory; the last time I was here with my family we waited in line for an hour for a five minute ride. There is a short breakdown, though, which gets the lights up and doesn’t help the atmosphere. Atmosphere is the buzzword of this whole park; it hasn’t got the budget of Disney but it has charm and attention to detail that Our Dear Leader Mickey often forgets about.

On the bus Paul already announced that he hates pirate ships. Something about the sensation of being tilted at a 120 degree angle. But he loves Villa Volta, which sort of does the same thing but indoors, all the same, even though I sort of tricked him into going in. I’m starting to realise how much of this park is given over to backstory. Villa Volta has as its ‘theming’ (the technical term for all that goes into a ride that isn’t cogs and gears) a haunted house owned by a highwayman who was cursed for his greed, and every bit of this backstory has to be explained. So there’s a lot of animatronic speeches for our Welshman to sit through.

We wander on, over hill and through dale. A mentally disabled woman slowly being helped into a boat stops all of the ride Gondoletta dead in the water. I tell Paul what the name of the ride is, and how it started life as an outdoor ripoff of Disney’s Pirates Of The Carribean before becoming a calming trip past flowerbeds and waterfalls. He shrugs and walks on. It’s true; I probably know more about theme parks, and this one in particular, than is healthy. I used to have an ambition of designing such a park myself - came up with rides and everything. It’s all about the fantasy, walking into an escape from the ordinary. In the end I found that in film. But just as I still have ambitions in novels and plays, I wouldn’t write off the Conceptual Designer thing yet either.

De Vliegende Hollander, the newest ride, is fantastic. Terrifying, but you want more when it’s over. It tells the tale of the Flying Dutchman, the legendary ghost ship captained by a man, as with Villa Volta, consumed with greed. Slightly hypocritical, considering the prices the Efteling charges for entry. The ride is designed just like a good script. The waiting area, a journey through 17th Century alleyways and docklands, sets up the story and establishes the atmosphere. The ride itself builds in tension, from a simulated storm in misty darkness, to rain red as blood pouring down from above. And of course it all ends with a suitable climax as our little boat gets launched into the outside world for a rollercoaster ride and a splash into an artificial lake. Sweeping orchestral music plays through the whole thing. Spielberg couldn’t have written anything more satisfying.

Next, to the heart of the park, the fairytale forest, where bits of Andersen and Grimm are depicted in lifesize. I stand and muse a bit at the Wolf and the Seven Little Goats, basically the continental European version of the Three Little Pigs. The variation comes in there being a Mother Goat in play. At the end of the tale, after the wolf has gained entry to the house and eaten all but one of the little goats (or kids, as I refuse to call them) their mother comes home and finds the survivor hiding in the grandfather clock. She then proceeds to take an axe to the wolf’s belly, replace her (still-living) children with stones, and push him into a well. Quite the feminist example - rare in fairy tales and wonderful to see, even if she is a goat. Some of the newer additions to the forest try a little too hard to be scary and/or moralising. The Little Match Girl, which is basically about a virtuously poor child seeing delusions as she starves to death at Christmastime, reminds me of the fact that this place started out as a recreation park set up by the local parish. Nuns used to donate their stray hairs for Snow White’s wig.

As the day turns into the afternoon we set about ‘doing’ every rollercoaster the Efteling has. I used to avoid most of them, but peer pressure can be a vicious thing. We take, in growing terror, the Piranha, the Pegasus, and with much wailing, the Python, which only a few months ago had the restraints come loose halfway through the ride. People were able to pull them back down and there were no fatalities, but still. Now I feel I’ve conquered something. Then it’s the Dutchman again. The Bob, a simulated bobsleigh ride, beats us about a bit. Fata Morgana next. This is that Pirates of the Carribean ripoff I talked about earlier, moved to a new location and indoors, with fakirs and flying carpets instead of buccanneers. Still awesome though, and in some ways more effective in getting you involved in another world than the sweetness of Droomvlucht. The people in front of us in the boat stay for a second ride. Smart, or obsessed with health and safety and unwilling to leave a moving vehicle? We finish with Vogel Rok, which you wouldn’t know from it sparse bones and eggs theming is about Sinbad. The ride itself is good but has too many bare black patches - the opposite of the Hollander.

We try for another go on Piranha but it’s closed. Everything is closing, in fact. Feeling like a kid threatened by going home, I turn off the beaten path and into the Sprookjesbos for a final wander. I see the golden ball of the princess fall. The evil queen’s doorway is closed. A strange sputtering comes from Mother Holle’s house. The troll king has shut his curtains for a well-deserved nap. The lanes are empty. There is something melancholy about it. Once outside, waiting half an hour for a bus, I again think of my childhood, curling up in the back seat of my mum’s car, playing with whatever I got from the gift shop and dreaming of all that I’d experienced. And would want to experience again soon.

So that’s the moonage daydream; now for the freak out. We’re coming to the end of the tale now and I’ve generally avoided sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll in this recap (not that there’s been terribly much to tell) but there’s one experience I don’t want to keep from you, although there’s no way my words could describe it adequatly. Please don’t take it as an anti-drug scare tactic. I just think it is interesting, and I’ll definitely endeavour to employ it in fiction somewhere.

After de Efteling we stuffed ourselves at a uniquely Dutch Chinese-Indonesian restaurant, then - after much fussing about whether smoking or eating would be worse on our already taxed stomachs - we had a halfburnt, chocolatey spacecake each. My reaction, which took about 90 minutes to start kicking in, was one of visual and physical dislocation, absolute panic and total paranoia. Paul led me home and I was convinced he was leading me astray. None of the streets made sense to me, and when they did we were going the wrong way up or down them. A constant monologue ran through my head, and out my lips as well, apparently, though Paul had to tell me afterwards that I was muttering to myself the whole time. I thought I was keeping it inside. I shouted, got angrier the more Paul laughed at my reaction (he, of course, was experiencing the desired effect), twitched, shivered, ran my dry tongue over cracked lips, and more such unpleasantness. When we finally got to Atie’s flat I tried to open the door with no actual key in my hand.

I’ve never reacted this way before - and the fact that it came from something as wussy as spacecake just makes it worse. It really is impossible to describe what went through my mind, except to say that there was a lot of it and it was speeding through my brain at a terrified speed. I doubted whether I was in an illusion, and found myself clearheaded enough to know I was stoned, but still somehow unable to completely convince myself that it would all pass. That the effects took most of the next day to wear off didn’t help. I drank a lot of water, when we went to the Van Gogh Museum, the last thing on our to-do list, tried not to connect the dark thoughts that made him paint ‘Wheat Field with Crows’ too much with my own. The museum, which has an algae-invested artificial lake that can be seen as a tribute to Vincent’s general mindset, was the only ‘thing’ we did that day. I didn’t want to risk much more. In the evening, by which time I’d gotten my head mostly back under control, more nasi goreng, then a forgettable Rashomon-meets-24 actioner called Vantage Point (with a throwaway role for Sigourney Weaver) at that gorgeous Zaal 1 of the Tuschinski cinema. We ended the night in a kraakpand pub with shopping bags used as lampshades, a dog wearing a red tie, and Jacques Brel’s original French Port of Amsterdam, the David Bowie version of which I’ve been singing all trip, playing on speakers. It is a fitting end. The next morning, some snacks for back in Ealing, a bottle of wine for Atie, and a fond farewell.

On the plane back now, after a long line at the security checkpoint. Feel torn between a sense of ‘I’ve been here forever and this is now my world’ and ‘it’s all gone by way too fast’. Our plane gets us to Heathrow with about an hour’s delay. It is a peculiar thing adjusting back to Oyster cards, the other side of the road, unread e-mails and the stark reality of an empty fridge. We go to see Shine A Light at the Imax cinema, and are astounded, by the rockin’ (how tacky am I to drop the g from rocking?) good documentary/concert but also by the cinema itself. I’m already eagerly awaiting the Lord of the Rings all-nighter on the third of May, and ever so gently trying to convince Paul to join me. He hasn’t seen the films yet, you see, and this would be the best way to introduce him to my other home country. Short of taking him along on a trip there.

Now there’s an idea…

Hustling

Arrived back in Amsterdam this afternoon. Atie, cousin and angel of mercy who’s left us half her flat for the next four days, gave us a tour of this illustrious address, Singel 65. I took a photo of a bath with more interest than I’ve ever done before. This was the bath I was born in, you see. My parents were/are hippies and water births were in vogue at the time. Or I started to be born here, anyway. Legend has it I was long time in coming and mum eventually left the bath and tottered over to the couch to complete the task there. I’m not sure how far along I was at that point, but it does make for a charming mental image. Anyway, this flat has been in the family since the Seventies, and the location’s so good that I’ve already assured Atie that if and when she has progeny of her own and moves to the suburbs I’ll be happy to take it off her hands.

Wandered the Jordaan, an authentic Amsterdam neighbourhood that looks just like the rest of the city, full of charming canals and thin buildings, but without the tourist infestation. Like south of the Thames in London, basically. Then saw Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead at a side room in Tuschinski, a fantastic Art Nouveau cinema that hosts all of Holland’s film premieres. I’d like to show Paul the main screening room, which is like something out of the West End, but that’s currently showing an action flick with little to recommend it. Devil is directed by Sidney Lumet, who brought us Dog Day Afternoon, one of my all-time favourites, and will therefore always be in my good books. This particular film is not a real high point for him, but it has some excellent moments and performances, and the central storyline of two generally well-meaning loser crooks, brothers in this case, who plan a simple robbery and find the whole thing spinning spectacularly out of control, harks back to the glory of 1975. The relationship between Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Albert Finney, son and father, both intense and seemingly emotionless men concealing a lot of violence, while at the same time convinced they’re so dissimilar, is affecting. Mused on this some more - it’s always a good sign when you’re still talking about a movie an hour later - in a typical Dutch pub with plush red carpet hung over the dark wooden tables as if it were cloth.

The next day. Ten to eight already. It’s the first chance I’ve had to write, which must mean it’s been a good day. We’re at something called Players Cafe, in the notorious Red Light District. Considering the location and the hour, we’re quite astounded to find we’re the only customers. But its probably good fortune that we’ve had no onlookers - Paul probably wouldn’t have been able to persuade me to play pool otherwise. He’s been chipping away at my phobia for competition (for which read: my fear of losing) for a while now, kicking a football around and the like. Now he’s managed to put a cue in my hand. I’ve just finished the third game of pool I’ve played in my life. I lost, but potted four balls. By far my best result so far. My previous best shot was years back in New Zealand, launching the ball at the barman’s head.

I woke feeling rather Buddhist this morning, calm and collected and at peace with how things are going and my place in the bigger picture. This bears mentioning because it’s not an experience I’ve often had. We visited the Achterhuis, also known as the Anne Frank Museum, which extended my reflective mood. The Holocaust is so iconically familiar to us now that we’ve become innoculated to some degree to the horrific images of the death camps, to the statistics of the dead and even to the testimonies of survivors. But it’s the well-preserved images of normality, like the pencil marks on the wall where the growing Anne and her sister had their lengths measured, something my parents also did with me and my brother, that get to you still. A sombreness not unlike that at Westminster Abbey hangs in these rooms. Living ghosts dwell here. On our way out we linger for a while at an interactive audio-visual showcase called free2choose, where whoever’s in the room at the time can press buttons to either agree or disagree with social and ethical standpoints offered, and then see on a pie chart what the rest of the room (for which read: the country) thought. I was rather surprised to see 33% of the room say that they wanted it made illegal to burn the flag in protest. With this cheery thought in mind, we finished our pilgrimage to the dwellings of the dead with a visit to the Westerkerk and the memorial of Rembrandt. Documents state his funeral was held here, but that he’s actually under our feet is unlikely as Rembrandt died destitute despite his past successes and was buried in a pauper’s grave, which were disinterred after a number of years.

For something completely different we headed back over the Singel canal and to de Wallen, de rosse buurt, ie: the red light district. A must-do as ubiquitous as the Night Watch. Although, truth be told, for those who aren’t in urgent need of visceral companionship or stocking up on double-ended dildos there is actually precious little to do. The sex shops are tacky rather than titilating and the actual prostitutes behind windows surprisingly hard to find. Apparently Balkenende and his repressed friends are cracking down on a business that is as much a part of Holland as cheese and windmills - and more likely to lure tourists too. Most of the ‘windows’ we encounter are hidden behind an old church. We wander by a few times but because I have no particular interest in meeting the pimps I don’t risk a picture. Not that there’s much to see. Their glow-in-the-dark lingerie makes the girls look like contestants in a Miss Chernobyl beauty pageant.

So we turn our backs on this porn meccah and wander instead to Amsterdam’s bars. In one, a coffeeshop called The Doors, filled with classic rock relics (but strangely no Jim Morrison on the jukebox until we ask for it) Paul again persuades me to play a game of pool and I, wonder of wonders, actually defeat him in a nailbiting game that goes all the way to a black ball sudden death. I couldn’t have written it better. I’ll assume it was Anne Frank and Rembrandt van Rijn watching over me, rather than inspiration from the muses behind the windows. Although anything is possible.

Birthday Blues

We’re in the car of my auntie (strangely, the longer I’m back in Holland the more British my word choice becomes) Petra, heading east. We’ve just come from my uncle Harald’s birthday party (conveniently scheduled right next to mine) where I recapped the last few years of my life for various cousins and inlaws and Paul spent most of his time nodding obligingly - he’s a good sport, considering he doesn’t know the language, and they’re good sports too, speaking in English half the time for his benefit. It could be said that visits like these are a family obligation, and I do intend for this trip to be a holiday rather than an elongated Christmas dinner, but still you’re always a little curious how these people who once towered over your crib are faring.

Now we drive through the utterly flat countryside from Noord Brabant to Drenthe. These are provinces, but don’t bother getting an atlas out because all you really need to know is that the journey takes you through a fair bit of the nation. Not that that makes it much of a journey. If you don’t count the incessant traffic jams (so common that we have a word for them especially) the Netherlands can be traversed in about two hours, North Sea to Germany. It’s a tiny place if you come right down to it.

Dutch light plays on the glowing green and yellow paddocks. There are pancakes in our near future (a top priority on my list of typical Dutch foods to consume; a list that I’m a little behind on after my unwell period) but despite this tempting thought we have trouble staying awake. We’re like babies still, rocked into contentment by warmth, movement and rhythm. I was told once that the reason military marches rely so much on drums and steady rhythms is that this reminds us of our time in the womb, listening to our mother’s heartbeat during labour. Clearly that taps into a different part of our psyche than this quiet rumbling in the back of a car. Snoozing against the window, I don’t have much trouble believing it. But we do eventually make it to a pancake boat, after our rather pushy GPS voice threatened us with wrong turns and a dip in the canals on occasion.

In the village of Elim now, at auntie’s house. The silence of this parochial place is spellbinding. Michel - an Amsterdam native, husband to my cousin Maaike and father to Simon, a shockingly cute baby I met at my uncle’s this afternoon - apparently likes to hide out in the bungalow that we’ll be sleeping in tonight, as his deadlines approach and his creativity runs dry. He’s a composer, see. Hopefully the place will have the same effect on me and Paul. I’ll keep this notebook handy just in case. I’ve been given one breakthrough already - I’m starting to think the lingering heaviness in my stomach isn’t illness. Rather, I’m homesick. Maybe it’s because it’s my birthday tomorrow. Maybe it’s the fact that the still water and rolling pastures remind me of the house I was raised in. If you squint a little my aunt even looks like her sister, my mother. Whatever it is, I find myself jonesing for the simplicity of childhood.

I wake up on my 23rd birthday with a heart attack. All the traditional warning signs are there - a tingly, stiff left arm and a pressure on my chest that feels somewhere between a vice and a very brutal massage. It passes away with time, luckily, and Petra’s husband Wybrand, who’s a doctor, diagnoses it as stress and sleeping awkwardly. Paul, meanwhile, has been suffering from back and neck problems as well as an achy head. I sometimes feel we’re less like tourists and more like the walking dead. Or at the very least the walking wounded. I may return to London shellshocked.

Giethoorn smells of memories. Even more than the sight of my old school or the sound of the wind whistling through the reeds its the scent of freshly-cut turf and mouldy straw that takes me back ten years and home. Or one of my homes, anyway. Born in Amsterdam, raised in this water-crossed village in the east of the country, then moving to New Zealand and now living in London, it’s hard to decide where my home and hearth actually is situated. Where the heart is, I suppose, but the heart doesn’t know what it wants.

Anyway, we rent a boat and take off into the maze of little rivers that divides the farmsteads and until recently were the only form of transport in what hyperbole calls ‘the Venice of the north’. Nowadays the locals mostly traverse Giethoorn on foot or bike, and the only people you’re likely to see on the water are Japanese tourists. We chased some of these down the river, waving a spike on a rope around and employing our best piratey rolling rs. One time we got stuck in the reeds and I cut my finger open on the flax, but there’s nothing wrong with bleeding like a good buccanneer. There’s something very liberating about having a boat, even one as minute as ours. You’re your own man, you make the decisions on where to go. Pirates were murderous rogues, I have no doubt of that. But I wonder if there isn’t some truth as well to the romanticised ideal of freedom that drove men, and women, to choose the outlaw life. Musing on such questions, we glide past haunting scenes of rusted farming instruments and actual cars abandoned in the grass. Eventually we come upon a great lake, and on it a pavilion containing a restaurant. The centenarians inside stare at us openly and strangely, but it has begun to rain and the wind blows harder than a Port Royal prostitute. Any port in a storm.

Driving home with dad now. We’re handed over from family member to family member, sleeping in a different guest room each night. There’s something disorientating and unexpected about it all. I’ve got my taste for travel back, and if I had a chance I’d go straight on and see the rest of Europe. Only problem, I haven’t got family distributed all through the continent of whose good nature to take advantage. It is now dusk, blue and purple. The quaint villages and endless green vistas are starting to blend into one. Once at my father’s house I have a relapse of this morning’s heart attack that’s soon cured with some Paracetamol (wouldn’t it be great if proper heart attacks were as easily taken care of?), and I can devote my attention completely to my dad’s very flash and jealousy-inducing home cinema set-up and the film screening thereon. It’s called Don’t Come Knocking, a Wim Wenders film about a lonesome man and drunken fool trying to reconnect with the family he’d abandoned and in particular with the children he’d never seen. A nice, melancholy film to end a nicely nostalgic, slightly melancholy but very beautiful birthday.

So, now I’m 23. Alexander the Great ruled Greece by this age. I wonder what my plan for tomorrow will be?

Dutch Tolerance

It’s early evening. We’re sitting outside an Amsterdam eetcafé, somewhere between a pub and an informal restaurant, waiting for our order. We haven’t paid yet but are already enjoying our drinks. “I trust you”, said the barman. It’s the first bit of proper Dutch tolerance we’ve encountered.

When you’re born in a place and then don’t spend a great deal of time in it, it’s easy to see it through rose-tinted glasses. The Netherlands was supposed to be America the way America was intended, a nation of respect, understanding, compromise and true democracy. Drugs are regulated in a common-sense way and prostitutes have their own union. Everything goes and yet the crime rate keeps sliding down. That’s how I advertised the place to friends. But really, I’m as much of a tourist here as anyone else. And though I understand the language, I don’t entirely comprehend the place as it is now. Within a few years of us moving to New Zealand the centre-left government fell and a conservative Christian one took its place, led by Jan-Peter Balkenende, a nerdy, pasty small-town pastor type who looks like a gangly Harry Potter. Two high profile murders, those of extremist politician Pim Fortuyn and controversial filmmaker Theo Van Gogh (yes, related to the Van Gogh) shocked the country and facilitated a general swing to the right of the public mindset.

I woke relatively well this morning, bundling up and taking care with what I eat my only concessions to my ever-strengthening health. We’re staying at my grandmother’s for one night, in a flat outside the centre. After dropping off our bags we headed back around one. We were going to take the metro from the Centraal Station at the northern edge of the centre and then walk back down to the Rijksmuseum in the south, seeing the city in the process, but at Waterlooplein two rather authorative-looking police officers in day-glo yellow pulled us off the train and nearly fined us 60 Euros for putting our feet on the seats. They were waiting for us specifically, so one wonders if a person on the train reported us, and if such a person goes to the Anne Frank House and doesn’t see what all the fuss is about. In the end it was our foreign home that saved us - the coppers didn’t want to deal with the paperwork and let us off with a warning.

An utterly ridiculous situation, of course. All the same, I was chastened and walked hurriedly as I took a shortcut over grass a little bit later, and not brave enough to sneak a few snaps once in the Rijksmuseum. This Dutch version of the National Gallery is currently under reconstruction. So are the Modern Art and Maritime museums, incidentally - you’d think Amsterdam is preparing for the Olympics with all these public facilities being polished. But the tourists can’t be denied their Night Watch, so they’ve set up a Greatest Hits collection in a side wing. It hardly needs saying that you still have to pay full price, and there’s no student discount.

The experience itself was enjoyable, mostly because of a rather excentric man who was cataloguing every ship that took part in the first war against the English through studying the paintings of the era, and insisted on giving me an enthusiastic and at times mind-numbingly thorough private tour. It also perfectly illustrated the Dutch penchant for both personality and vulgarity. In the propaganda-filled naval warfare scenes, English sailors are blown sky-high in poses and with facial expressions that wouldn’t be amiss in a Wil. E. Coyote cartoon. In paintings of winter landscapes characters are caught with their britches down doing their business through a crack in the ice, while young lovers and aged married folk skate by. We may be renowned for being good at it, but that doesn’t mean the Dutch take painting very seriously. Even Rembrandt’s Nachtwacht is worth a smile once you know that the militia officers had to pay to be included in the group portrait. Presumably the ones with only half a face visible couldn’t afford as much as the captain of the guard.

After dinner, which we don’t skip out on paying for, we head back to the metro. Paul and I sit across from each other to avoid temptation. And it’s a good thing too, because there are two more cops sitting next to us. On, as it turns out when they leave, seats meant for invalids.

Homeward Bound

Warning: The following has been edited for content. But what is there is true. I’ve tried to make it amusing, I’ve tried to make it reasonably comprehensive, I’ve tried to make it at least somewhat appropriate to the interests of whoever it is that reads this blog, including strangers fishing for ’sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll’ style details. But the fact of the matter is that I know a sizeable part of my audience personally. Some of them are friends. Some are family. Some mark my work. So don’t expect any Fear And Loathing escapades. It was largely not that kind of trip. And it is absolutely not that kind of story.

The 9th of April opens on a summery, blue-skied London - an even better omen than the snow three days before. The Tube speeds us to the conveyor belts of Heathrow in half an hour. There’s a bit of a hassle when we’re made to check in ourselves through a touch screen and our lack of computer knowledge comes into play. I guess this is how BMI, the obscure airline with which (whom? Do airlines have personalities?) we’re flying, saves on manpower and manages these cheap (well, doable) fares. Ah, the romance of travel. There’s a little more hassle at the security checks, where we’re made to take off our shoes and thoroughly felt up by the control officers. I’ve never had this happen before, and I’ve been to Singapore, where they’ve made chewing gum an illegal substance. The irony is, of course, that I have Clearasil in my bag. Which is a liquid. Which is not permitted in hand luggage. Which my bag is. But if you smile nicely, take your belt and sneakers off and just say no to all their questions I guess it’s quite easy to sneak a bomb on board.

Landing at Schiphol now, still in one piece. All is bright and warm enough, though grey compared to London. The way into Amsterdam, as traversed by train, looks very much like the way into London, down to the leafless trees by the side of the tracks. The city itself is the same way. Marks & Spencer is called Albert Heijn. Regent’s Park is Vondelpark. And the Stayokay hostel feels exactly like a university dormitory, complete with pool table and fresh-faced teens giggling at the idea of coffeeshops and sneaking into each other’s rooms after lights out. After settling in we spend the evening in a nearby Irish pub watching Manchester United win a place in the semi-finals. A transitionary period between Paul’s world and mine, if you will. After the victory celebrations we wander the surrounding area a bit, where the main thing we learn is that all canals look the same at night.

The world of the pint and the fish ‘n chips may not have been that willing to let me go so easily. Three or four times during the night (I was in too much of a delirious state to count properly) and twice more this morning, I threw up in the room’s sink. This was made even more unpleasant by the sudden, mid-heave appearance of a rather quiet Italian in our midst, an extra guest who arrived after midnight. Up until then Paul and I had had this particular dormitory to ourselves. I’m sure I made an excellent first impression on the guy. Whether it was food poisoning, overeating or something else (though not the drinking; the price of pints in that pub kept me sober), all I know is that it’s only now, with noon approaching, that I’m starting to feel human again, if not exactly ‘better’ yet. My determination to actually do something fun on this first day also has something to do with that.

It’s now evening. I’m turning in early after shivering all through our wander through Vondelpark. We popped into the Filmmuseum next door as well, but that’s not showing an exhibition at the moment, only running screenings. Which makes it a cinema, not a museum, according to my calculations. Still, cooped up as I am with a lot of time to think, I find myself relativising this whole situation. This lingering queesiness forces me to take things easier, to let go of some of my perfectionism. I’ve had this whole trip planned out. Perhaps now is a good time to step back and let things ‘just happen’ for a bit. For instance, I could despair about the fact that the display on my weathered old camera has broken and I now have no way of knowing what the pictures I take look like or whether they’re even being made. I could also see it as the universe telling me to get away from behind that lens a bit and look around more. Because I am in Amsterdam. In Holland. In the Kingdom of the Netherlands, to use the full name. Land of tulips, cheese and my forefathers. And that’s a fact worth celebrating, in sickness or in health. Although ‘health’ better get a move on.

Croeso Iyr Cymru

The title, by the way, is supposed to say ‘Welcome to Wales’. Whether that is so is entirely up to Paul, who spell-checked it for me.

I’m back home now, after two nights in Newport with Paul’s family. It’s the beginning of a holiday that will take us to Amsterdam tomorrow afternoon and shall continue until life starts returning to normal on the 19th. The trip has begun very auspiciously indeed. I woke up at 9am this morning to find that the world outside had been turned into a winter wonderland. And none of that slushy stuff either; proper layers of snow like you’d see in a Coca Cola commercial. And it’s still going on even as I write this.

Lizzi called to ask if I’d want to frolic through the flakes, but obviously I had a bus to catch, so instead she wished me a happy birthday in advance and promised a cake for when I return. Paul will stay another night to take advantage. Cake at the end of the tunnel is a good thing, because up until now returning to London has implied only the beginning of Term 3, something I’m trying not to think about. This is a holiday, and I want it to feel like it.

On the bus now. Or coach, to use the technical term. In the waiting hall, which was crowded even though I came half an hour early, I got to talking with two charming Welsh grannies who happen to be going to Newport too. I’m always relieved when I can follow other people rather than find my own way - at least when it comes to travel. Hearing them discuss the intricacies of rugby and child-rearing with our entertainingly blustery busdriver was amusing too. It takes us half an hour to get out of the centre. We pass a mosque and what I’m told is the Wembley arch. Once outside the city things are greener (most of the snow has melted) and flatter than expected. Hilly is a good word for it. Mildly uneven, even. I’m jonesing for Holland already.

Paul’s home is nicely middle-class. I don’t know why I was expecting Billy Elliot (something to do with a French avant garde afficionado in South Wales) but I’m not getting it here. His parents are nice and his mom has set out the table for me and my vegetarian lasagna especially. I always cringe a little at being a guest in somebody’s home, caught between their generosity and my slightly shy shelf. But by the time the chocolate cake comes along I’m content with my place.

Newport’s one tourist attraction, an Edwardian ferry bridge, was closed. Took train to Cardiff, which has a nice city centre that’s out of bounds for cars and filled with flower stalls (again I think of Amsterdam). Looked up some tacky Welsh dragon related tourist tack - a nice rehearsal for Amsterdam. Saw the sweet and subtle Lars And The Real Girl - a tonic for the soul. Also, booked our hostel for the ninth and tenth. The trip is now completely set and I am as filled with relief as with anticipation.

On the bus back now. Assinine pop on the radio. They’ve distorted the voices, as if these boybanders don’t sound enough like robots already. We cross a river over a big, flash bridge. Now it’s the verdant fields of England that roll past us. They look just like the verdant fields of Wales, but I don’t tell Paul that. In a few hours we’ll be in Ealing. In 24 I’ll be in Amsterdam. I hope and am convinced that my entries from the motherland reporting on what I’m doing will be considerably shorter than this one. Because I’ll be too busy doing things. Because that’s what’s called a holiday.