The Sound of Silence

The Sound of Silence

I live in Breda, a Dutch city situated close to the Belgian border. Not so long ago the town prided itself on becoming the eighth largest city in The Netherlands. Shortly after, though, things went quiet. Apparently Breda had slipped back into ninth place. Somebody must have moved out.

Despite it's prominent role in the history of the Lowlands, outside of the Benelux countries few people have heard of it. Those who have, apart from a handful of historians and some war games enthusiasts, know it only as a place one passes on the motorway between Amsterdam and Antwerp. However if you have the time it is worth while stopping for a visit and not just because it has more bars and cafés per square meter than any other Dutch town. The whole year round  there is plenty to see and do including several events to suit a variety of tastes and... you can drop in and see me!

The apartment block I live in is about half way between the town centre and the forests to the south of the city. A quiet fairly dull suburb with unimpressive architecture but plenty of green space. Well, it's quiet most of the time, except in the mornings and late afternoon when it's a short cut for commuters – oh – and the mini buses and cars picking up or dropping off children at the various schools dotted around the neighbourhood. In the summer the field across the road is used by the schools for outdoor activities... on the whole a quite joyful background noise but it is amazing how loudly even the smallest little girls can squeal when they are playing. At the other end of the field older boys live out their Champion League fantasies. GOAL! PENALTY! CORNER! PASS! SHOOT! YEEEEAAAAAH!

In the weekend it's more peaceful, that is if nobody is repairing, rebuilding or extending their house or just trying out a new drill they got for their birthday..
Oh yes, and we live on the fourth floor and for some reason, maybe the wind, the architecture or just the way sound travels, if there is a festival in the centre of town or even further away we can hear every word, note and bass beat quite clearly while at street level the event may be barely audible!
Otherwise it really is a quiet leafy district ...well except that we've had a circus just across the road for the last two weeks. The music they played during the performances wasn't exactly my taste but the donkeys braying for food or attention was quite endearing although they had some difficulty getting themselves heard.  
You see our apartment building is being renovated...
...one of the advantages of not owning a house is that you don't have to bother about maintenance or renovation. In our case the housing corporation does that for us. The disadvantage is that we have no control over what, when or how they do it. Usually when the time comes we are descended upon by an army of workmen, a great deal of dust, disruption, noise and inconvenience which is close to being traumatic but is over in a relatively short time. A short, sharp, shock. However in this current, less drastic, renovation round the corporation has chosen a different tactic. The work has been spread over several months and involves just five men, three hydraulic work platforms, one paint brush and a hammer. Every work day morning the team arrive at seven  o'clock in high spirits, there is plenty of laughter, at seven-thirty the mobile platforms are started up and moved around a bit before the coffee break. After the break a lot of standing, looking and thinking goes on, followed eventually by some indiscriminate drilling and random hammering until they drop tools at four o'clock sharp!

Some of this work force are from eastern Europe, Poland to be specific, they speak broken Dutch with a Flemish accent. In Western Europe there is a constant stream of migrant and seasonal workers from Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and so on. Without them our building industry, agricultural industries and health services, among other things would be struggling. However, and it probably won't surprise you, we are going against the flow. For part of the next six weeks we will be working in Romania. Helping out on a camp site in a small village where there are just three shops, no cafés and generally the only sounds are the village church clock and a few clucking hens. I just hope we don't find it too quiet!

Frappé - Ice Coffee

Frappé – Ice Coffee

I don't have, and I never have had, heroes. Neither have I ever been a real 'fan', not of a pop singer, film star or football team. There are however people that I admire. Some of them quite obscure like the East German, I don't know his name, who escaped in a hot air balloon over the heavily guarded border to West Germany. The attempt was desperate, difficult and above all dangerous. The craft was improvised and under powered. To have any chance of success weight had to be kept to a minimum, he took no luggage, just his wife, baby and.... his racing bicycle. Now, through my eyes, that's pretty close to being a hero!

Another person who certainly deserves to be mentioned is Dimitrios Vakondios, the man who invented Frappé in1957.
Ancient Greece has given us Theatre, Drama, Poetry, Philosophy, Physics, Astronomy, and Geometry – The Archimedes' Principle and the Pythagoras Theorem. Frappé, Greek Ice Coffee is a relatively recent invention and in my opinion should be right up there at the top of the list alongside, or even above, Democracy. Democracy is generally believed to be the most important thing that has come out of Greece however the democratic process does have many inconsistencies and imperfections. There are several ways that democratic elections can be organised and many and various ways of counting and appropriating the popular vote, all have their advantages and disadvantages. All can lead to distorted, unsatisfactory, or even curious results.
With Ice Coffee there are no such problems. Two easy choices: with or without milk and how much sugar. A cool and refreshing drink with no complications. Okay you can add whipped cream, chocolate chips or other embellishments but that's overdressing. Anyway I prefer the most simple variation, made with instant coffee, water, ice cubes and not too much sugar.  I've never managed to master the art of drinking iced coffee Greek style though. I guess I'm just not relaxed enough! In Greece men and women, young and old, rich and poor, can be seen anywhere and everywhere, slowly sipping Frappé through brightly coloured plastic drinking straws. They seem to spend hours over just one drink!
However it's not because Dimitrios Vakondios invented this popular drink that I am nominating him for my personal hall of fame. It's the reason why he invented it that makes him a serious candidate.
The reason: he was desperate for a cup of coffee and couldn't find any hot water!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Have Pen, Will Travel...

HAVE PEN, WILL TRAVEL...

I was aimlessly trawling though my archives recently – these short autobiographical sketches are based on what I found there:

Go West!
Mutual histories, myths and legends are what keep families together. Unfortunately in my family these are few and far between. As far as I know one of my grandparents was mad or French or both, another, the only one I ever knew, was either Irish or Cornish. He owned a ukelele. I know even less about the others. There is a hint of Italian somewhere but I think that had something to do with my father's first wife. Yes both my parent had been married before as a result I had a half brother and a half sister. Judging by my date of birth I was probably a direct result of the World War II ending and the victory celebrations that followed. I was born and grew up in London. After my father died, relatively young, for some reason the two halves of the family didn't mix. I lost, until recently, all contact with my brother and his family. The other half of the family moved out west to seek their fortunes. Well, not very far west at first, just about 100km, to Swindon. There they settled and multiplied before moving on. Some of them are now so far west they can't  go much further. Just this year my sister's oldest son was the last to leave Swindon and head for the West Country. So that just leaves a nephew in New Zealand.
Oh - and me..... I went East!

Have Pen (1)

I think I have been drawing all my life, as far back as I can remember, probably from the moment I could hold a crayon.
Right through school and all through my first job. I was  a trainee civil engineer, I never progressed much further than holding the wrong end of a tape measure but my technical drawings were quite impressive if not always as accurate as they should have been. Bored and unchallenged, by ' mutual consent', I left. After a series of odd jobs, and even odder job applications, I applied to a teachers training college in Canterbury, I chose art as my main subject, to be honest, not because I thought I could draw well but simply because I thought it was the easiest option. I learned a lot at this college, mainly that I didn't really want to be a teacher! However I also discovered that I had a wide range of creative talents. With no real background I was, it seemed, quite good at a lot of things, including painting, drawing, pottery and textile design, writing poetry and drama. The downside being that I was not exceptionally good at any one of them. Forced to specialise I surprisingly chose textile design because of the wide variety of techniques available and there was no graphics department.
On leaving college I led pretty much the traditional/cliché artist life: penniless and living in an attic. I moved back to London and then on to The Netherlands. A new town, Breda, and several new attics. I had several exhibitions, in cafés, cultural centres and minor galleries, some more successful than others. I went through various phases and artistic styles but increasingly visual 'jokes' were creeping into my work. Almost without realising it I evolved into a cartoonist. At first illustrating educational material, then books, pamphlets and public service campaigns. Yes, I even earned some money!  Well - enough to provide myself with regular meals!
My main body of work over the years has included annual illustrations for a writer and publisher of books on management, weekly and monthly spots on trade magazines and work for various departments of Breda City Council, a local pressure group representing the interests of the handicapped and chronically sick, Phillips and Mikrocentrum a high-tech institute in Eindhoven.
Apart from illustrating other peoples books, magazines and articles a book I both wrote and illustrated was printed and published in Kyrgyzstan, now that doesn't happen to everybody!!!   

Have Pen (2)

If I could draw as soon as I could hold a crayon, I started writing as soon as I could join letters together or maybe even before. I have no idea what I found to write about at that age! My memoires or the meaning of life maybe? Probably not, I think there were a lot of cops, robbers, cowboys, indians and pirates involved. Through junior and secondary school I enjoyed writing essays. Essays were the only pieces of homework that I ever managed finished on time. In those days at school and later in college exams were not mulitiple choice, we mostly had written exams and, here's something I wouldn't have admitted to my fellow students at the time, I liked them. I was never very good at names and dates but given a pen,unlimited paper and two or three uninterrupted hours to write I could generally write enough around and about most subjects to convince the examiners and, unlike homework,  I enjoyed doing it.

By the time I went to college, which was several years after leaving school, I had started writing poetry. Some friends who were studying English persuaded me, with some difficulty, to show my poems to the head of the English department. He was so impressed that the same friends, all aspiring poets, regretted having sent me to him! My work was published in many British fringe poetry magazines and, when I moved to the continent, also in Dutch and Belgian publications. Hard to believe now but I even gave some poetry readings and, I have suddenly remembered, I had a book of poems published by a small independent Dutch publisher! I wonder if anybody still has a copy? I don't.

I also wrote some songs for a rock band, I needn't have bothered, no one could hear the words, a few sha-la-la's or doo-wa-diddies would have done just as well! 

At some point painting and then cartooning took over, pushing any writing into a distant second place. What I did write was limited to translation work on a wide variety of subjects, from sociology to sperm donation, and occasional short English texts for websites or presentations. It was only about seven years ago that I seriously started writing again having decided to begin a monthly column for a handful of students in Kyrgyzstan.I always found it difficult to write or concentrate on anything much longer than a poem or a short story and even more difficult to decide if I wanted to be serious or funny. Writing these columns, which now have a much wider audience, enables me to be both – often at the same time.

Will Travel

I like to think of myself as something of a traveller but the truth is although I may travel more than most people I have travelled a whole lot less than many others. Anyway if a desire to travel is genetically determined my chances were no better than 50- 50.
My father was a hard working man but when there were things to do around the house that he couldn't, or wouldn't be bothered with, he would say “I'll do it when I come back from my holidays”... he never , ever, went on holidays. 
My mother was quite the opposite, if fact she went out one day and kept going all the way to the West Indies leaving me at home alone with my father while my sister was sent to live with strangers.  
When my mother returned a year or so later my parents must have come to some sort of agreement, after that they lived, not exactly together, but under the same roof. Why? I can only speculate but whatever the reason this agreement didn't involve family holidays and certainly not trips to foreign countries!

I did run away from home once when I was about seven years old. The escape was well planned and cleverly executed however I had not thought things through. Once out I had nowhere to go!

I was soon recaptured.

Going Back

My trips back to England are not particularly frequent and a whole lot of things have changed since I left Britain more than 30 years ago...and so have I. What's more - they go on changing with the result that each time I return I feel like I am in some sort of parallel universe. Many things seem at first sight familiar but then again nearly everything is in some way different. The names of the shops on the high streets have changed. In restaurants I am not sure what to order. Worse, in pubs I often don't even know which beer to ask for! I am constantly, unrealistically, amazed by the prices. Not because things are so much more expensive but because I have an outdated concept of the pound and due to the infrequency of my visits prices always seem to have increased by huge amounts while, in fact, they have been creeping up incrementally, day by day, like everywhere else!  

Not obviously a foreigner but hesitant with my choices, puzzled by the prices and fumbling with coins I am no longer familiar with, I'm sure shop or bar staff think that I am mentally deficient in some way and who can blame them. In a totally foreign country difficulty with the currency, prices and terminology is all part of the fun but being a stranger in my country of origin is at best a surreal experience at worst it makes me feel really stupid!

 

 

Everything does eventually start falling into place but by then it's time for me leave!

FAQ

From the archives:  first  appeared in 2010 later  published in the book 'Letters to Kyrgyzstan' 2013.

FAQ

It doesn’t take long. I’m at a party or reception and somebody I don’t know will discover that I am not Dutch.....and then the questioning begins. “Where do you come from?” “Oh -where in England?” “How long have you lived here?” “When, why, how did you come?”
“Do you prefer The Netherlands to England?” ”What do you miss?” “Is Dutch hard to learn?”
“What language do you think in?” “What language are your dreams in?”
I have answered these and similar questions so often over the past 30 years that I sometimes find it hard to give serious answers. I have to admit that occasionally, if I’m feeling particularly mischievous, or bored, I invent a new story.
Inevitably somebody will ask: “After all these years living here do you feel more Dutch or English?” Now that is a difficult question to answer.

An English politician once said that you can tell how far an immigrant has truly integrated by which national cricket or football team he cheers for. Well, for me cricket is slightly less interesting than watching grass grow and my interest in football has declined to almost nothing over the years. Despite this we do invite friends around to watch television whenever England and Holland play each other at football, but usually I'm so busy with the catering that I forget to cheer!

In many countries potential immigrants have to take a citizenship test, a list of questions designed to see how much they understand the society and culture of their intended new homeland. I once downloaded and completed a version of the Dutch citizenship test. I failed! But so did half of my Dutch friends. However a trip to England , for me, is like a trip through time. I find myself in familiar surroundings but surrounded by unfamiliar objects. England has changed, and so have I.

I speak Dutch with a foreign accent.

When speaking English I now have a slight Dutch accent.
My Dutch friends still joke about me being English. My English friends think of me as a foreigner.
I like the directness of the Dutch when it isn’t an excuse for rudeness. I like English politeness when it isn’t an excuse for avoiding the issue. I find England scruffy and untidy and Holland over regulated. England has beautiful hills and valleys, Holland has magnificent skies and seascapes. I prefer English language books, films, and music but completely new subjects and experiences are often easier for me to talk about in Dutch.
I like Dutch beer and English cheese
I never really liked tea with milk, the favourite English drink.
I can, and do, drink coffee all day long, a Dutch habit.

So how do I answer the question?

An American who had lived more than half of her life in England was asked a similar question on the radio. My answer is based on her reply which summed up my feelings perfectly:

“I haven’t become Dutch but I am no longer English.”

Dr.Facebookstein

Dr. Facebookstein

In the book by Mary Shelley and all the films that followed Dr. Frankenstein is determined to create human life and he succeeds. Bit of a problem though, his human turns out to be ugly and eight feet tall but things only really go wrong when this creatures gets out into the community and starts searching for a life. With no background or past Frankenstein's creation has no way of knowing how to behave and the local inhabitants certainly have no experience of dealing with a creature like him.

Blaming social media, and Facebook in particular, for at least part of everything that is wrong in the world today seems to me to be a bit like, well no, a lot like shooting the messenger! Social media provides a means of transporting messages, it doesn't create them. Opinions on social media range from the naive to the conspiracy theorists who think everybody is out to get them so Facebook must be too. Whether you like it or hate it, it's quite clear that, whatever the original intentions, social media has turned into something of a monster and like Dr. Frankenstein's creation it has become too big and difficult to handle. To be fair,neither the doctor or the creators of social media could have foreseen the consequences. While Frankenstein's version stumbled around looking for a life, rescuing little girls and scaring the chickens on the way, the social media monster is doing much the same. Relatively new on the scene it has helped to fight injustice and corruption at the same time as it has promoted terror and racism. However, unlike the Dr. Frankenstein's creation, social media is here to stay and like the printing press and film/radio/television before it we will have to find a way to live and deal with it. As with these predecessors discussions on what should be allowed to be published, what should not be allowed and who should do the allowing will no doubt go on for ever.

Alongside content the concerns about social media mainly are about issues of privacy. I don't know how to break this to you but big business and governments have been collecting and trading information on us since long before the invention of computers. I can't help feeling that some of the traditional media that is shouting the loudest about the misuse or abuse of our demographics and statistics are simply jealous that social media can do it bigger and better than they can. Which doesn't mean there aren't privacy issues, there certainly are. Happily there is a very simple and easy way of dealing with most of them and that is not to post anything you don't what others to see or use. Or  just don't use social media at all!

Anyway so long as this ancient cartoonist with little interest in commerce and economics  and absolutely no administrative ability keeps getting offered these sorts of jobs on LinkedIn: Junior Accounts Manager, Sales Development Manager, Trainee Consumer Satisfaction Consultant, Marketing Advisor, Administrative Assistant, Junior Commercial Manager... I'm not too worried!
I mean that's like studying Dr.Frankenstein's details and then offering him a job as a children's nurse or the manager of a Pizza Hut.

It is certainly true that our activities on the media are monitored and the advertisements we see on our screens are based on these activities.

With all it's faults and potential problems social media does enable people to communicate with, send messages, photos, films and music all over the world and provides a link to millions of people everywhere, all completely free of charge. This has to be paid for somehow. All the newspapers and magazines, nearly all the television stations, most sports teams and cultural events are financed by advertising. If Mary Shelly's story had been set in modern times, Dr. Frankenstein's experiments would almost certainly have been sponsored by one of the major drug companies. So why not social media? Now personally I don't really like the fact that a whole lot of cultural, artistic, athletic and other events are dependant on advertising revenue but it doesn't keep me awake at nights. Advertiser will claim that they are providing a service for consumers. Informing us of what is available on the market place. That may be true for some. For me it's a mild irritant, something I just put up with and for the most part ignore.

But while I've got the chance I would like to mention one thing to those people that are monitoring my online media activities and supplying me with their 'targeted consumer information'. I get a disproportional amount of advertisements for sunglasses. I assume that this is because in my Facebook profile picture I am wearing sunglasses.

What I would like to point out is that, yes I am wearing sunglasses in the photo which means, as you can see clearly, I already have a pair of sunglasses..............
thank you!

SPRING!

From the archives:

March 21st : Nooruz in Central Asia, the first day of Spring for us and it's nearly Easter 
a good time time to resurrect this column from 2014 :

Spring!

There are places in the world where the weather is so predictable that it is seldom a topic for conversation. For most of us, however, the weather is the common denominator. English is increasingly the language of international communication but the weather is the topic we all talk about. It affects us all but in quite different ways. For example: those of us who are cyclists are not very fond of wind whilst windsurfers can't get enough of it. During our holiday in Romania, the locals were happy that it had at last started to rain, good for the crops and the potato harvest in particular. We, on the other hand, camping in a small tent were less enthusiastic.

Anyway, most of us are interested in the weather and there is an awful lot of it about. According to the news media we are always having the coldest, hottest, wettest, windiest ,driest period since weather was invented.

This winter the British Isles suffered a series of storms, the accompanying rainfall caused widespread flooding. In North America they suffered one of their very worst winters ever. Here in The Netherlands however, a country famous, among other things, for skating on frozen canals we had an exceptionally mild winter. Skating was mostly done indoors, the temperature rarely sank below zero. January and February were wet but never really cold. In the middle of last March a late snowfall heralded the start of a long cold, wet and miserable period that went on until June. At the same time this year the temperature reached 20º C and since then it has been relatively warm and dry. Spring was early. The birds who nest on our balcony arrived almost a month earlier than usual. Their arrival, as always, was announced by a loud hammering and a great deal of building activity inside the nesting box. It's a very small box but it sounds like the male bird is converting the attic, adding a second bathroom and extending the kitchen. Most of the time the female bird is perched at the end of a branch close to the balcony, chirping loud and clear instructions. She doesn't like the colour of the walls in the nursery, the shower is too high and the dishwasher has to be moved...

Living on the top floor of a four storey apartment building we look directly into the tree tops. There we witness at first hand and close quarters enough romantic encounters, courtships, arguments, couplings, births ,departures and disasters to fill several TV drama series. Even before the leaves start appearing Wood Pigeons, Magpies, and Turtle Doves begin flirting. This year we have some newcomers, a pair of Crows are well on their way to finishing a nest. Once the buds start opening the leaves develop quickly and it becomes a little more difficult to see who is building what and where and to keep track of all the casual visitors to our trees. Even though they have been recently thinned and trimmed they still attract plenty of birds of all shapes, sizes and colours. There is always plenty of activity amongst the foliage.

Things will quieten down a little while the eggs are being hatched. Then there will be a great deal of flurrying, fluttering and flying here and there as the parents try to keep up with the ever increasing appetites of their demanding chicks. For the birds in our nesting box and in the tree there are plenty of natural and man made dangers that will have to be avoided in order to raise their fluffy babies to full flying adulthood. They will not all succeed.

We follow developments with interest, anticipation and a certain degree of anxiety.

I never expected, intended or wanted to make my own nest in an apartment block and saw it as a temporary solution. That was nearly 30 years ago. Like everything it has its positive and negative aspects. Living and working almost in the tree tops during springtime, however, is an undiluted pleasure.

                                                              

50 Ways of Sliding

50 Ways of Sliding – The Winter Olympics

Last week I had a bad cold. There's nothing much good one can say about a bad cold except maybe that it's not 'flu. A bad cold usually means being not sick enough to stay in bed but not fit enough to do much else. While over the counter remedies provide little relief this particular cold coincided with the Winter Olympics and that has provided plenty of distraction.
The Winter Olympics is a two week long festival of sliding on skis, skates, snowboards or in streamlined bath tubs. Some of the sliding is punctuated by jumping, shooting or even sweeping while many events involve quite a lot of falling over – well, snow and ice are very slippery substances. Several countries or groups of countries have their own favourite ways of slipping and sliding. In those countries these sports are hugely popular whilst outsiders may well find them confusing, eccentric or just plain boring.

Here in The Netherlands the most popular winter sport is speed skating, especially the 'long-track' version. Only football gets more coverage than long-track speed skating in the media. Why the Dutch are so enthusiastic about a sport that the rest of the world find only slightly more interesting than watching grass grow is a mystery but then when you consider that the English can get excited about cricket and darts I guess anything is possible! Once the winter season gets started the newspapers are full of predictions and speculation about the upcoming international skating tournaments. Even more so in an Olympic year. Every slip or stagger is analysed, every comment dissected and every conflict between trainers, skaters, sponsors and the skating authorities widely reported and heatedly debated. The fact that virtually nobody in the rest of the world cares, doesn't matter.

The Netherlands had 33 participants in the Winter Olympics only four were not skaters.

The Dutch television had seven extra cameras in the long track skating arena, I'm sure other national TV stations did the same for their favourite sports. The result was some of the best television I have seen in a long time. I'm not about to bore you with the details of the tournament. The sport was exciting enough for the insiders, yes I'm a convert. As with any sport there were winners and losers, come-backs and breakthroughs. There were tears of joy, frustration, disappointment and relief not only from the athletes, but also from their families, friends and supporters. There was enough drama in between, around and during the races for a whole TV series but packed into just two weeks and registered by some stunning creative and, surprisingly respectful, camera work. Some pictures I'm sure will stick in my memory longer than the performances. Like when one of the most successful Dutch female skaters ever, dubbed by the media 'The Queen of the Ice', flung herself into the arms of the real King of The Netherlands after she had won yet another gold medal. Some of the best pictures came from the neighbouring ice arena. From the less popular, less predictable, more international and more dynamic short-track tournament. In one shot the cameras captured the delighted antics of the Dutch women' s relay team who, having failed to reach the final, surprisingly won bronze when two of the finalists were disqualified together with the frustration and disappointment on the face of their reserve team mate who for the second time in her career got to the Olympics but didn't get to skate! Then right at the end of the tournament a bouncy, hyper-enthusiastic twenty year old screamed full into the camera that everything was 'fuckin' fantastic' and 'fuckin' fabulous' immediately after winning an unexpected but fully deserved individual gold medal … contrasting with maybe my favourite moment: away from the skating arena a Czech snow boarder also took part in the super-G, a downhill skiing event, and surprisingly won it. “There must be some mistake” she shyly stammered in disbelief when she was approached by the TV cameras.

Ah well – it's all over now, except for some of the competitors appearing on talk shows and my cold. Luckily this coming weekend there are plenty more distractions on the television including the World Championship indoor athletics in Great Britain. Athletics is one of the sports I enjoy watching most but, to be honest, what I would really love to see this time is a successful British athlete throwing his arms around the Queen and for her to give him a great big hug in return, well wouldn't you? 

Unfortunately it's not going to happen-  she probably won't even be there..........