I like Amsterdam, and not for the reason you do. I'm not allowed mood-altering substances, remember? No-one bombed the centre during any of the wars, so it still looks like it did a few hundred years ago when the Dutch were as rich and middle-class as it got. My routine is to wander around, have lunch, visit a record store, the American Book Centre, get afternoon tea, wander some more and get supper. This is the front of the cafe, on the Utrechtsstraat, which I thought I had collected a card for but it wasn't.
It gets much cuter inside, where there is a tiny courtyard at the back.
Just up the road is the quite wonderful Concerto record store, over three fronts and with a basement. It has vinyl 12" for serious DJ's and buffs and a decent mix of most other genres. I picked up three Eric Dolphy and two Tomatito CD's. I know I could have got them on Amazon and maybe cheaper, but it's not the same as browsing the bins. If my companions are very unlucky, I spend a while in Art Multiples on the Keizergracht: it has at its own boast the largest collection of postcards in Europe and I don't doubt it. This time I picked up thirty to make a couple of collages.
Afternoon tea on the pavement at Goodies, followed by a stroll with swift dives in and out of art galleries in the Jordaan. Most of it looks something like this. Everyone who can't afford to live in the centre on one of the canals - which is most of the human race now - wants to live in the Jordaan.
If you're wondering where the foodie photographs are, the Dutch have been adamant about maintaining the simplicity of their snack foods: it's basically eggs, ham and cheese in various permutations, and apple tart with cream. But in the end, who cares? The centre of the town barely changes, and may be the last famous town left in the world with as relaxed a feeling. Just walking round it is enough to clear the soul.
The Eastern edge of the Netherlands is one very long beach, and in all the visits I've made there, mostly just for a weekend, I have never walked along those sands. So this time we went out there: Utrecht to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Zandvoort direct. The station is a terminus really is about a hundred metres from the promenade, reminding me of Sheerness. (Don't ask. Childhood.) The beach is wide and flat, and makes for a big wide sky. It's not the prettiest place in the world,
but it had the atmosphere of those Edwardian beach paintings, and it really did have waving flags
There are about twenty cafes and restaurants along the beach, all numbered, and they all looked good. We stopped for a coffee and ice cream at this one, which my intuition told me might look better on the inside...
Utrecht is famous for a half-finished Cathedral and a very old university. Nobel prize-winner Gerard t'Hooft works there. It also has a fine example of what the Dutch can do with a poisoned industrial site when they decide to get serious. It's called the Griftpark.
Okay, the Good Burghers of Utrecht did not put the street art there, but someone did and it's not half bad. There were at least two groups of people - okay, attractive young women - exercising that evening, look closely at the second photograph up and you will get the general idea if not many details.
There's also a restaurant, Griftpark 1, which I really should have taken some food snaps from. If you're in Utrecht for the evening, go eat there, especially in summer. You will be pleased you did.
On my way into work yesterday I passed through the Covent Garden Paizza. And saw, well, this...
It was the pre-start show for the Gumball 3000 rally. The other day our managers did a thing called a "Mood Survey" to see how we felt about a) the day ahead when we arrived at work, b) the day we'd had when we left work, c) the future. We weren't too sure about the future, but the present got quite high marks. When they asked, I said that one reason I had voted NO to the future was the upcoming office move. It was a quality-of-life thing, I said. Because they don't hold pre-start shows for the Gumball Rally in the City.
I have to tiptoe round the 80's. There was so much good music, a lot of which can be dated to within a couple of months. Who now remembers any of those British Jazz-Funk acts, every band given the Trevor Horn touch of magic, everyone who ever fronted for Stock, Aiken and Waterman, or Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis? And how quickly it was trampled on by the behemoth that was dance music? Hand Held In Black and White is the last record that reminds me of how I could feel a sense of possibility in a gust of wind, in the sun reflecting from a window, in the sight of a pretty girl.
After that, my world started to close in, slowly so that I didn't really notice it. The gap between the upbeat, club-oriented music I was listening to and the increasingly withdrawn life I was leading became greater and greater. I had terrible insomnia for two years in the mid-Eighties, changed jobs and choose my first property not wisely and, unknown to me, was heading for a fall. But the music was so bright and shiny.
The Fall was alcoholism. While everyone else was having the Second Sumer of Love, my liking of a tipple turned into an actual problem. I spent six years as a practising alcoholic, with a ghastly dry drunk in the summer of 1991, when I was crazier than when I was under the influence. I called AA one grey, damp October morning 1993, after I had been unemployed for fifteen months. A couple of years later, I heard Not An Addict on MTV and it knocked me out.
"It's over now, I'm cold, alone / I'm just a person on my own / Nothing means a thing to me / Oh, nothing means a thing to me". Underneath all my appearance of normal living, that is still how I feel. As for Fast Love, George Michael's hymn to casual sex and the sexiest video you will ever see, and that includes anything with Shakira in it.
Most of the recent music I like - from chillwave and progressive house to The Script - has a little touch of jazz, or blues or 80's soul. You might not think Bach has anything to do with blues or jazz, but you would be wrong. His compositions have the same sense of being snapshots of a endless flow of music that Coltrane's records do: a record of a constantly evolving flow of thoughts about melody, harmony and rhythm.
The record companies had a notorious cull of their catalogues and artists in the late 1980's - there's a line in a Missy Elliott track "since Elektra dropped Miss Anita Baker". But CD's, PC's and the internet allowed the musicians came back with a vengeance. There's so much music around today, and a lot of it is excellent. Fire up your iTunes and look at the radio.
Somewhere, a young man is walking down the road at three in the morning after a late-night session with friends. She was there, they exchanged a kiss in the kitchen. It's warm and the air smells of early summer. He doesn't have to be in college until eleven that morning. And this is playing on his phone's media player...
Somewhere in the late 1960's, a young man is leaning out of his bedroom window. He's been reading, perhaps Dostoyevsky or Robert Heinlein. It's late, and the warm wind is blowing through the trees. He can hear each leaf rustle against the other. He might be anywhere but in the London suburbs, and in his heart he is. Anywhere but here, with this soundtrack...
I've been through at least four collections of music. The first two on black vinyl, the third on cassette, and the current one on CD. There is so much to choose from, I may as well pick from my favourites at random. Summer In The City brings back a memory of walking along St Martin's Lane at the age of twelve, Mustang Sally of swimming at Plumstead Baths and Sugar Sugar of slot car racing at the Richmond Vineyard.
In the summer of 1971 I was interning at the Isle of Grain Power Station as part of my OND in Electrical Engineering. Top of The Pops was Thursday Night Compulsory, and the men there used to greet Pan's People with remarks like "I've seen better in Rochdale" and made remarks about Curtis Mayfield that can't be repeated in these PC times. On came Carole King. I knew what she was going to sing and inwardly shuddered at what these men might say. To my utter surprise, they fell silent at a song that talks about the end of a relationship - perhaps they knew about "staying in bed all morning just to pass the time".
This next song was Hall and Oates' calling card. Wow. What can you do with lines like these: "think I'll spend eternity in the city / let the carbon and monoxide choke my thoughts away / and pretty bodies help dissolve the memories / but they can never be / what she was to me"? It's linked with the memory of a hot chestnut stand on Tottenham Court Road in the winter of 1974.
This blog has now been going for two years, mostly three entries a week. According to Google Stats, since July 2010, when Stats became available, I have had 1,800 page views - which is exactly 1,800 more than I either thought I would get or intended to get. The most popular are about various recruitment scams - followed by a post about my holiday in the Algarve.
For almost all of that time I've maintained an output of three posts a week, most of them fairly lengthy thought-pieces. I haven't had the urge to change the name of the blog, or my profile, or its look, since I settled on the current look. It started as a place to rant about work, and I still do that, but it's developed. It's still about my life, and my life is mostly about what I'm reading and thinking.
It's nice that somebody has read something I've written, but it's not essential. So what if no-one reads me or you? Almost nobody reads almost everybody: there's a reason an editor can name all the top-selling writers in their field. At any time there will be only a few hundred people who can make a living from the speculative creation of art-works. George V Higgins remarked in his classic On Writing that statistically you have a better chance of being a Congressman than a fiction writer who makes a living from their craft.
The point is that the we write. As if we were being read. We practice a craft, we observe its disciplines. We produce, and courtesy of the Internet, we can publish. That makes us writers. Sales make us successful writers - or not. An un-successful writer is still a writer, they're just not going to get laid on the strength of it.
Keeping up three posts a week isn't as easy as it sounds, even with practice. I draft the text in Evernote whenever I get an idea and then edit and polish it on the Sunday before publication. Thanks to the way Blogger lets you specify a date when you want to publish and then does it for you, I usually stack three posts up on a Sunday for the coming week. So I don't have to worry that "I haven't posted today". If I really have run out of ideas, that's when I post some photographs in the Things I Saw Where I Lived and Walked series or put up a favourite piece of music from You Tube.
So another year of blogging beckons. I know that in it, we will be moving offices from heavenly West End to the Liverpool Street Industrial Estate, and very probably experiencing the first re-organisation and redundancies for just over two years. I will have to decide to renew my annual membership at the Third Space. I intend to get the front garden re-built and go on at least one more week-long foreign trip to the country. Then there's work, the gym, movies and occasionally just plain dossing around. I have no idea if I'll ever get into another relationship again, let alone this year.
