Four Days in the Netherlands: Amsterdam

Lunch at the Cafe American on the Liedesplein, then to the Art Unlimited postcard shop on the Liedestraat, just by the bridge over the Prinsengracht, and then I forgot to take pictures. Except the one with the girls in the window. Amsterdam manages to be at once in a time warp and up-to-date and I’m not quote sure how they do it. Possibly by not allowing anyone to build anything new in the Centruum at all. Next time, I’ll know what to look for.

Four Days In The Netherlands: Rijksmuseum

The first time we tried to visit the Rijksmuseum last year, soon after it reopened, the queues were up the stairs and along the block. We passed. This time I had to wait about five minutes to buy a ticket. (I remind my readers that the National and Tate Galleries are free.) There were people taking photographs of the paintings, but you already know what all the Vermeers look like, and the Nightwatch (Rembrandt), and the Meagre Company (Hals) and the Swan and all that other stuff. So I took pictures of anything but the paintings.

Four Days In The Netherlands: A Walk to Utrecht Station

This is what “a walk to the station” looks like on a Saturday morning in Utrecht. The station and its surrounding area are being re-built, and it’s not going to be a few years yet, so this doesn’t end as serenely Dutch as it starts. The flower market is there every Saturday, and the food market is there every day.

Two ordinary residential streets in that part of town: are you going to tell me architecture doesn't make a difference to how we feel? For some reason Die Bakkerswinkel is a girl-only bakery, but I always get cakes there for Sunday afternoon; that's a narrow canal on the right, and a chunk of the University of Utrecht on the left; the tower of Utrecht Cathederal; two shots of the flower market; the Dutch leave bicycles everywhere; three shots of the food market; building works visible from the station: the Netherlands really is made of sand; and yet more bicycles at Utrecht station.

May 2014 Review

Well that wasn’t the month I thought I would have. The bit where I went for the second rep on the bench at 90kgs and lost it, and had the bar bang against my hands (rather than my teeth, or chest, or nose) was not in any plans I made for the month. And it happened the first Sunday morning. By about 10:15 I was in the Soho walking centre, where there were three girls sitting as invisibly as they could because they needed a morning-after pill. The triage nurse pressed and wiggled my hands, and said that since everything was moving and I wasn’t screaming in pain when she pressed or moved anything, I hadn’t broken any bones. She put a loose dressing on it and I carried on with my day.

My fault. Stupidity. The one and only time I’ve been that stupid in many years of hefting weights. No excuses. What with the gym closing for refurbishment, it wasn’t until the second half of the month I could even think about lifting weights. When I tried to heft a 14kg dumbbell off the rack, the tendons in my left hand told me to stop the insanity now. I could only handle 9kg. I could handle 14kg last Sunday. I’m not even thinking about playing the guitar.

Sometime the next week my left hand looked like this…

… while my kitchen mid-month looked like this…

So what with a 60th birthday, damaged hands, and making breakfast in the back bedroom for a week (which was the most irritating thing), I was having an emotional month.

Before going out to the Netherlands, I had a pedicure (really!), a manicure and a trip to the dental hygienist at The Gentle Dentist, where they took photographs of my mouth. Close-ups. You do not want to see those photographs. Nor did I. Teeth, like hands, don’t lie about your age. Still, my teeth sparkled afterwards.

In the Netherlands, I went to Zandvoort and walked along the beach, stopping for a healthy burger lunch at Tijn Akersloot

before wandering around a bit more and making my way to Utrecht. Saturday we walked through the flower market on the way to Utrecht station, went to Amsterdam, visited the Rijksmuseum, had lunch at the American Hotel, raided Art Unlimited for more postcards to make a collage...

and at Concerto I had coffee as a folksinger rehearsed, while my friend looked for DVDs, and we browsed the American Book Centre before making our way back to Utrecht, where we had supper at the Griftpark1. Sunday was a walk round Utrecht, with lunch at the Louis Hartlooper Complex, followed by an afternoon in the garden and supper at Te Koop. Monday was another stroll, lunch and a the journey back to Schipol and so home.

Where the kitchen wasn’t finished Monday evening because (insert unlikely story here), so I went to work Tuesday and took Wednesday off to put my house back in order. I asked the fitter if he could recommend a decorator, and by the time this is posted, he will have come, looked, drawn breath and quoted.

Sis and I had a birthday supper at Merchant’s Tavern in Shoreditch - thank you Sis - and then our regular monthly supper at Tramshed in Shoreditch. That’s our annual trip Out East for this year.

I saw Locke and Fading Gigolo at the Curzon Soho, Pandora’s Promise, Sexy Beast and the Jane Bown documentary through Curzon Home Movies, A Touch of Sin at the Renoir, and Edge of Tomorrow at Cineworld.

I read Black Gold by Anthony Wild, about the history of coffee; Undercover by Rob Evans and Paul Lewis, about undercover policemen in the UK; Tea, by John Griffiths, a history of the Tea industry; Savage Messiah, by Laura Oldfield Ford, a compilation of her illustrated psycho geography zine from the Oughties; King, Warrior, Magician, Lover by Robert Moore and Doug Gilette, which is exactly as New Age as it sounds.

My left-hand little finger is still recovering but no longer hurts every time it comes into contact with anything.

Four Days In The Netherlands: Zandvoort

When I asked the lady in the ticket office at Schipol for a ticket to Zandvoort, she said “Single to the beach! Beautiful day for it”. The Netherlands is sand and its coastline is one long beach which changes name from place to place. Zandvoort used to be where the Dutch Grand Prix was held, but if the wind blew too strongly off the sea, sand got on the track and made it slippery.

If you get an afternoon spare in Amsterdam and it’s fine, hop on the train to Zandvoort and take a walk along the beach. Stop at one of the restaurants along the beach for a snack and a drink. Many of them are open all year. Enjoy the sunshine and the bracing North Sea onshore breeze. The sky is huge, the beach wide and long and it’s a refreshing way to spend three hours.

Four Days In The Netherlands: Friday Afternoon

I went for my annual birthday trip to see my friend in the Netherlands a few weeks ago. I’ve been over there a zillion times and never taken photographs, so this time I left the laptop behind and packed the Canon EOS1100D. For the next few weeks I’m going to post the results. Let’s start with the journey from Schipol Airport to Zandvoort, via Amsterdam Sloterdijk.

The industrial ("office") estates on the Schipol side of Amsterdam; there was a train cleaners' strike that day, so heaven knows what a cleaned train looks like; Amsterdam Rai station; industrial estate with lake; Sloterdijk station; errr... one part of Sloterdijk station, the other bit is along this path and the train I wanted was hidden downstairs; giant cheesegraters; Haarlem; Haarlem Station; overhead wires; college boys and a standard issue Dutch girl at Overveen station, which is the last stop before Zandvoort.

What does a young man born and raised in fog and chaos do?

This series of posts has been an attempt to find a way of talking about people’s behaviour without falling into gender stereotypes: “women do this, men do that”. Doing that involves some stylistic changes: use quantifiers like “most” and “some” instead of implicitly talking about “all”; give a swift nod towards the good before describing the bad in detail; talk about men, but not explicitly about women; talk about “people” rather than genders.

I can say most of the things Rollo Tomassi says, but without his generalisations and underlying assumption that there is an underlying Nature of Women That Is Just Different And Not In A Good Way. I see it as all part of a human condition that applies to and affects men as well as women.

Certain kinds of women do this, certain kinds of women do that. Sweeping generalisations do not help. We need to know what kind of flaws and chaos we are dealing with. If all women are like that, there is no point filtering. Rather, while all women have something wrong with them, they don’t all have the same things wrong with them, and it matters exactly what is wrong. Same thing for men, as well.

Throughout this series I have rejected dozens of generalisations and snarky comments about women and men, as well as whole paragraphs of theory about marriage, the effect of the development of digital-based cultures, and other such good stuff. I did that because I was rationalising my own behaviour and thoughts. And I of all people should not do that. Because I’m an alcoholic / addict / ACoA. I have a short attention-span, do things because it gives me a high, or am driven by a vanity only another formerly-pretty person would understand why I hold on to. (I do a damn good impersonation of a normal person. I pay my taxes and due bills, I wash and iron my clothes, I have a job and I even have a garden shed and a lawn. But get close and you will feel the self-centredness and dis-ease, the constant need for distraction and new. One day at a time I can do many things for many years, including staying sober, and one-day-at-a-time I might even hold down a relationship for many years, but that’s not what she wants.)

I started with the idea that everyone is flawed, and those flaws will turn into life-changing cracks. Everyone will mess up the lives of those around them: sometimes from malice or irresponsibility, and sometimes from sheer bad genetic luck. There are no right decisions for the long-term: the world will change in such a way that everyone will regret a choice made five or twenty or forty years ago. All we can do is cut our losses and change in response.

The idea that floated up while I was writing this stuff was the Marketing 101 thing. Women don’t want men, they want what men can do for them. And men don’t want women, they want what women can do for them. This has been behind all inter-gender behaviour since people started to notice that there was a difference. What is new, is that men and women now have the resources to do without each other, and that a fair chunk of them seem quite prepared to do so. What makes it hurt is that these MGTOWs and WGTOWs are reasonably high quality - who would care if they were only weirdos and un-dateables?

But they aren’t locked into it. If someone comes along who does what she needs doing, she may just team up with him. (The other way round is a movie fantasy involving Manic Pixie Dream Girls, so it isn’t going to happen.) Hence the need for self-improvement and Game: one of the things those career girls want is some fun and diversion. They are still women, and they still want attention, fun, diversion and fuss from non-creepy men.

What does a young man born and raised in fog and chaos do? There is no right answer. If there was, it would not be chaos and there would be no fog. Any given sequence of decisions might lead to bliss and fortune for one person, and horrors and poverty for another. Some are pretty slanted one way or another: becoming a junkie is pretty much going to wreck your life, but I’ve met some reasonably successful recovered addict-alcoholics.

He must filter potential long-term partners for psychiatric disorders and undesirable personality traits. I say nothing about children because I don’t approve of irreversible decisions. That aside, there is no decision that ensures the long-term, only decisions that can make the near-term a reasonable bet. Get into the gym, become familiar with the rich culture of our age, learn Game and don’t live in a distant suburb. Do what you want, have a way out and always be prepared to change.