Going to the mattresses

Since February, last year, my back has been aching. It started with small pangs when I tried to carry a box. A year later, I can’t get out of my bed in the morning. I had no idea that mankind needs a back so much. It is not that I can’t function, but I just look stupid all the time. I can’t pick something up from the floor without clutching something, or leaning heavily on my knees. For my work, I need to carry boxes and I just cannot get them into or out of my car without bending my knees like a Russian dancer. When I want to get something out of the bottom kitchen cupboard, my movements look like I’m on a French toilet. Getting out of the car is accompanied by a deep groan and the resemblance of a ninety year old. A minor detail is that I need three painkillers a day. 

However, I have never visited a doctor for this. My excuses are awesome. At first, I was convinced that it would just go away. On top of that, I didn’t have the time to go to the doctor’s. When it didn’t go away, I tried to make a doctor’s appointment but I never managed to call between eight and ten in the morning, which are the only hours suitable to make an appointment. Furthermore, I got scared that it had something to do with loss of muscle strength. But that diagnosis would lead to the conclusion that I should do something in a fitness school, and I just don’t have the time. Then it got worse and I started to be afraid that it could be a hernia, and I would need surgery. And I simply don’t have the time for the rehabilitation.

One day, I was waiting for the bus at Schiphol and regretting my not so high heels, and I tried to distract myself from the pain by looking at an enormous television screen. Suddenly, a commercial from TEMPUR came on. A TEMPUR Mattress is a high quality mattress, made with NASA technology. The mattresses and pillows form themselves under the influence of body temperature and weight and adjust themselves to the contours of your body. Therefore your back, neck and joints can rest in a natural position. Medical specialists recommend TEMPUR Mattresses to people with severe back problems. After a night sleep on a TEMPUR Mattress, you feel like a teenager ready for the day. To be honest, I was already convinced when NASA popped up. It seems to me that when astronauts use it, it must be good. On top of that, the commercial added that snoring can be considerably reduced on a TEMPUR mattress. And as the snoring of my husband had caused severe marital problems, I saw idyllic pictures of us renewing our vows. 

After this breaking news, I immediately managed to find the time to go to a Better Bed kind of store. The eager look on my face apparently gave away the loads of money I was prepared to pay and alerted the salesman immediately. I told him all the ins and outs of my back pain and he kind of sang his sentences: ‘Of course I’m not a doctor, but it seems to me that this is a classical situation of a too firm mattress. I can assure you that your life will be much better after we have helped you to a new one!’

And then he started his magic trick. He led me to a bed and asked me to lie down on it – off course, after taking my shoes off. I had stood for a long time and this bed felt like heaven. I closed my eyes and almost fell asleep. ‘Hum…, little bit too hard though, I think,’ the salesman said. ‘And you are so long and tall and light weight, this bed is too firm.’ I couldn’t help feeling flattered. The salesman led me to another bed. When I lay down, I immediately felt less pressure on my back. At that moment the salesman noticed my husband and asked me if he had sleeping problems as well. Before he could answer, I shouted: ‘He snores! And he’s always tired.’ ‘Really? Typical case! Your mattress is too soft.’ I got up. ‘That means that …’ ‘Yes I know…’ The salesman said. ‘It means that you both need a different mattress.’ He bent his hands like someone died. My husband was shocked. ‘That’s the price of getting older,’ the salesman said. ‘When we are young, it doesn’t matter what we sleep on, as long as we are with our beloved.’  I could have sworn he was grinning. 

‘But let’s concentrate on the lady now. This mattress is not suitable as well. Your hips are not supported enough. That means I have to bring you to the TEMPUR area.’
‘I told you so!’ I whispered triumphantly to my husband.

Like removing the veil of a bride to kiss her, the salesman removed the cover of a bed that already looked like heaven. I lay down and instantly felt that this bed surely supported my hips. And my neck, and my shoulders. I felt the fatigue flowing out of my body. Vaguely, in the distance, I heard my husband ask the salesman how much it cost, but I couldn’t have cared less. I was absolutely convinced that this mattress would solve all my problems. My back ache, the snoring, my tiredness, my stress. My business would flourish, my marriage would be better than ever only because I would sleep again. That was priceless.

Because of the diagnosis that my husband and me should have different mattresses, the salesman sold two TEMPUR beds that day. One firm, one soft. And yes, they could deliver the following Wednesday, so the painful period would soon be behind me. On top of this, the mattresses had 10% off, and we got two pillows for free. We only had to pay € 2.500,-.

Four months later. I still take three painkillers a day. I need help to get out of the bed in the morning. At night, when I turn on the other side, stabbing pain wakes me up and keeps me awake for several hours. Then I listen to the deafening snoring of my husband, which makes the frame of the bed tremble. And regarding the idyllic marital scenes: in the middle of our bed is a hill. That’s is because of the fact that the firm mattress of my husband is 5 cm thinner than my soft one. Whenever we want to lie next to each other, he has to climb up or I have to fall down.  When we go to bed and we are both on our own mattress, we sometimes ask: ‘Your side or mine?’ But even the thought of the effort that is needed to conquer the barrier between us, makes us stick to our own side.  The salesman was right: € 2.500,- is the price of getting old.

The dark side of December

The dark side of December

Since we're quite on our way in January, I thought it would be safe to post my last writing tasks. It's about a mother's terror in December. I't a long story, but I put two assignments into one. Have fun, and please let me know what you think.


The dark side of December
In spite of what the golden lights on the Christmas tree,  the warm, sparkly lights in every shopping street, the flickering, heartwarming candles and crackling fires in living rooms are trying to convince me of, it can never compete with the dark, miserable feeling that overwhelms me when December starts. It is the month that my motherhood is challenged the most. No, it is the month in which I have to face up to the fact that I am possibly just a terrible mother.

It starts with Sinterklaas: a group lie Dutch parents tell their children, just to have a useful threat at hand for a couple of weeks. Two of my three girls are luckily not believers any more (and I decided the third one won’t ever be – I’m telling her now in the middle of the crowd that watches Sinterklaas coming into town that this is a man dressed in a strange robe and a fake beard). But school has found a solution for older children not to miss all the fun: draw lots and make a surprise present and a poem for the one you selected. And then they return home. At first the piece of paper is moved from the table to the windowsill, from there to the kitchen, and if it doesn’t disappear in the recycling bin, it will be buried for ever in the bits and bobs drawer. Until that terrible question on the third of December: “Muhum … where is the lot? And what should I make? And what name  did I draw?”

It all ends with this scene: my husband is jigsawing, gluing, hammering, nailing, and sweating, and I am trying to rhyme the life of this kid I have never seen together. And if I ask my daughter: “What kind of a boy is Tim? And what does Senna do after school?” the answer is always: “He is nice and she goes home after school. I don’t know him/her very well!”

The morning of Sinterklaas we drive to school with the boot full of ‘surprise presents’, in the afternoon we drive back with a trunk full of ‘surprise presents’ and then I hope I soon find a way to get rid of all this rubbish.

Then the yearly ice skating trip is coming up. Which means that the girls need skates – ones that fit, preferably - and the school needs transportation to the ice rink, for which they turn to the MOTHERS. My children want me to drive too (I don’t know why, I’m terribly moody with a lot of children around) but I snap that I am busy enough trying to fix the ice skates in time. Mind you, we have FOUR pairs upstairs from previous school trips, but that means only one pair fits (the youngest one) and they are ice hockey skates and she is never ever going to wear them. She wants figure skates and my temper can’t beat hers. It takes me two nights of calling, driving around, exchanging with other parents to get this done.

And all this with the next obstaclein sight:  Christmas Crafts-morning. A very nice, cosy tradition of the school, in which all MOTHERS participate. The school is transformed into a Christmas market. In every classroom there are two crafts tables where different kinds of craft-things can be made. The children can run around the school all morning and choose the crafts they want to make. Every mother signs up for a table and sits there all morning, on a toddler’s chair if she’s lucky: they glue, paint or clay, depending on the required end result (this year, it was the ‘Wooden Santa’ for me)

Now what you should know about me is that I have zero skills in crafts. I can only glue my fingers together, whatever I cut is crooked and I will merely paint my clothes. So the least comfortable position for me is to be at a craft table, trying to teach children how to do it.

But before I was seated at a table, I’d already had a very stressful morning. Apparently I missed one of the school’s e-mails that told me that all children should bring a big box to school with Christmas decoration, floral foam, nice green stuff, a wine glass, toilet rolls, jam jars, old socks … My beautiful girls could remember every detail of this instruction, but only thought of telling me on the very same morning of the craft hell. So I went through the house, moaning , whining and scolding about how on earth I could manage to fill this box. Speaking of which: where the F*** could I find two boxes? All boxes were picked up the day before.  For me, at that moment, not having oasis was one of the most terrible things that could happen in my life. ( Why me? Why me?)

We finally arrive at school with some Christmas decoration in two pretty, small boxes that used to be perfume gift boxes. It wasn’t until we went home that I realise that the boxes were meant to bring all the crafts home and that I have two girls in tears because only one of the TWELVE Christmas thingies fits in the box. So I walk up and down to the car to put it all in, leaving a trace of shattered Christmas balls that fell out of their Christmas arrangements due to my slap-dash handling.

In the car I try to it make up to them. “I’m sorry. Next year we will take a big box.” The eldest sniffs. “You think it is rubbish anyway, all the things we make.” “No, that’s not true, I think it is beautiful!” “No, you’re lying” , the second girl weeps. “Last year you said when the Christmas holidays were over: thank God, can we throw this shit away now?” I mutter something indefence, but I am afraid there is none. This really sounded like me.

The rest of the day I want to stay in bed, preventing myself from hurting my kids even more. But the next challenge is the same evening: school choir performance on the Dickens market! Needless to say I spend all afternoon trying to find clothes that fit in Dickens age. At seven o’clock the choir needs to assemble in the middle of the shopping street. It is freezing cold. Not as cold as last year, when the temperature dropped below minus five and the snow caught us by surprise. However,  the performance is exactly the same as last year: same songs, same incompetent conductor with absolutely no sense of rhythm, the same not-singing children, same horrible sound engineering, same note to myself that I should get them out of this so called choir.

During all this, I’m trying to make it through the piles of end-of-year assignments and make 60 hours a week, at least.I can’t walk my dog properly and he is eating all the furniture out of frustration and I’m trying to find excuses for why our Christmas tree isn’t up yet.

Between all the e-mails clients send me, I discover the school starts spamming:
“(From the class parents) We’d like to make a nice Christmas present for the teachers, to give them the day before the holiday. Can you give your child one euro and a piece of nicely folded paper with a Christmas wish on it?”
“We need a hand with cleaning the class rooms. Can you help out on Friday afternoon? The children are just free then.”
“Please make sure that your child clears out the desk before the holidays and that you provide a plastic bag to put all the stuff in.”
“All the lice capes should be brought home and washed during the holiday.”
“Please remember that the children need to hand in their papers before the holidays.”

I click them away, agitated and frustrated. There is another very, very big struggle to fight before this all ends. Christmas dinner at school. The day before the holiday, all children eat together at school. A few days before, children can write on a piece of paper what they really like to eat and a Special Christmas Dinner Committee selects the dishes and asks MOTHERS to cook the meals. I’m really proud that my kids don’t fill in ‘fries’ or ‘pancakes’ or ‘pizza’, but that they put down: ‘spinach quiche’ or ‘sauerkraut from the oven” or ‘Catalonian meatballs’. But you can imagine what happens: I get all the orders. So I take another afternoon off to cook (I spare you the stress related to this part), bring the warm, lovely smelling dishes  to school in the evening, go home and clean up the mess in the kitchen, cook for my husband and my youngest daughter, go back to school and collect my kids and the bowls and plates. Back home, when I unwrap the aluminium foil, I see that with the ‘left-overs’, I can invite at least fourteen people for our own Christmas dinner and keep them satisfied.
“Mama, Í liked the sauerkraut”, one girls says quietly. “And my teacher too.” And the other girls says: “There were fries and pancakes, but I only ate three of those spinach quiches. I didn’t want to disappoint you.” 
I have the firm intention not to yell and snap at them anymore for the rest of my life and I hug them, burrying my tears in their hair.

The next morning, they wake me. “Mum, it’s our last day at school. There is a play and I am Maria. I need a blue gown. And a baby doll. And what is a crib?” The other girl goes: “Yeah, you should come and watch us mum. I’m a shepherd. Have you got a real shepherd’s staff?”

A few minutes later I have cursed, scolded, yelled, banged a door and called the office that I will be, again, not present this morning.

Bonita Avenue (part 1)

Once in a decennium a book impresses me so much that it turns into an obsession. In 2002 I read ‘Captain Corelli’s Mandoline’. I mourned almost ten years (I’m a slow mourner) for the fact I had finished the book.

The mourning process actually took place in the five stages of grief. First denial: I read it over and over again, but skipped the last page. Then anger. I was angry because I couldn’t read anything else. Every other book felt like an insult to Mister Bernières prose. Friends saw me suffering and kindly suggested literature they were very fond of, but actually they put our friendship at risk suggesting I should read Paustovski or Tsjechov. In the third stage, bargaining, I set myself goals: I had to give this book as a present at least once a week, to spread the beauty. Complete depression I felt when not everyone shared my admiration, to be honest, almost no one I knew. And in the last stage, acceptance, when I had told myself maybe this was just a phase in my life I had to go through to acquire a natural selection of my friends, it happened again. I was really unprepared for this. 

I’m talking about ‘Bonita Avenue’ by Peter Buwalda. The title is not appealing at all, nor the cover of the book. I remembered a news flash about it when it had been first brought out. Somebody had torn the cover, in several book stores. At that time I thought that it was just a way of promoting this book, bringing out a rumour that mystifies the public. Didn’t work on me. If it wasn’t for a student, who I gave an instruction to write a book review to practice his praising skills, which were apparently very good, I would never have read it.

By the time I finished the first page, I had stopped reading twice. Firstly to get my highlighter. The metaphors and comparisons were so brilliant I wanted to mark them for my students (‘see, this is how a metaphor should be like’. I stopped highlighting when I saw my book turn into a fluorescent yellow sea). The second time I stopped was to cancel all the dates I had further on that week.

What makes this book so brilliant? I’m not fond of admitting it, but it has something to do with the typical Dutch scenery. What I dislike in other Dutch books, is that writers hesitate to reveal the village or city. They give hints, but they don’t want to spoil their chances for international film rights. Buwalda couldn’t care less. He recreates Utrecht in the seventies, the firework catastrophe in Enschede, the University setting of Enschede. 

The troubling part of the book is that there is nothing to hold on to. The characters of the protagonists are extremely complicated. As a reader you are hopelessly trying to cling to a person that you want to identify yourself with. But as soon as you reach that point, that person unexpectedly does something disgusting. At the same time, Buwalda manages to make you feel compassion with the one you were very sure was the bad guy. There are no heroes and no winners.

That’s not new, but the way Buwalda handles it, is. The most intriguing challenge he took on was dealing with subjects you have always considered to be a part of boys magazines: mathematics, judo, pornography. No writer that takes literature seriously would  even think of making that central themes. 

Buwalda seemed to give priority to the plot, something that partly explains my unbridled enthusiasm because for me, plot is everything. He wanted to write a book in which a successful person, a judoka, finds out that his daughter has a lucrative business in pornographic photographs on the internet. But it can’t be coincidence when he’s on the internet once and reveals this secret. So Buwalada decided to make the judoka an injured one, who changed his career into mathematics, someone who spends his life on probability and statistics. So the plot imposed requirements on his characters. This had very radical consequences for his book. He had to make him a top mathematician, one who won the Fields-medal, but how can you do that when you’re not a mathematician yourself? So Bulwalda had to write at least two scenes that could convince the reader of the mathematic intelligence of his protagonist. 

A not unimportant part of my adoration is Buwalda’s own obsession. He knew that if he wanted to have impact as a writer, he would have to give his life to it. In an interview he reveals that he shut himself up for four years and wrote almost manically on this book. He had got a payment of forty thousand euro’s in advance from the publisher  to whom he had shown his outline. That’s is not much of a four years living. When he had finished his twenty one chapters, he printed it in a nice font and started to read. It was terrible. It was no good at all. He panicked, called a friend and said: ‘I really need your help.’ But the friend refused and told him he just had to go through this phase by himself. So Peter started to rewrite. He graded every chapter. There was only one chapter that deserved a 6,5 (out of 10), all the others scored between the 2 and the 4. And then the big recovery started. Peter worked his way up until all chapters had a 9 or a 10.  It was only then when it was good enough to hand it over to the publisher. 

Deep down, during the rare moment I allow myself to look at my deepest ambitions, this is the life I long to. Arrange myself a life in which it is possible to withdraw myself from the social pressure and create literature. Instead of that, I arranged a life that is full of pressure and obligations, apparently because I don’t dare to make the sacrifice and release all safety belts. In this book, the reader is embraced by the sacrifices Buwalda made, by his unconditional devotion to make every word of his story the best one possible.  His book leaves us with a terribly paradoxical feeling: a great relief that the scenes of terror are finally over and a deep feeling of depression that it is already over. 

Peter Buwalda won two debutant prizes. He was in the running for three prestigious literature prizes but didn’t win. In contrast to my experience with Bernières, I started to read the books that were obviously better than Buwalda’s, according to the jury. Maybe in a few years, when I look back, I can mark this period in my life as the ‘anger stage of the grieving process’ but I developed a complete and coherent conspiracy theory on literature prizes and why Buwalda didn’t win. That will the subject of my next writing task.  

How I wiped out a restaurant

Suddenly, it was about four months ago, we had an unexpected evening off. All children were staying at grandmothers or aunts and we were looking at a night with the two of us. Immediately, we got scared, because we had ran out of conversation material a long time ago. So we booked a movie starting at half past eight. Shall we go out for an early dinner? Great idea. We gathered around the laptop and went through restaurant review sites looking for a restaurant close to the movie theatre. A small never heard of restaurant called Ed’s kitchen, a Thai restaurant, popped up in the results several times, awarded with grades like 9,5, 9,8 and even one 10 (all out of ten, according to our aberrant metric system). Reviewers praised the quality of the food, especially compared to the price, the accessibility, the hospitality. According to the website, it was recommended to make reservations. My husband grabbed the phone, but no one answered. We started to get a little worried. What if the place was already fully booked? But one hour later, the telephone rang and we were really surprised to hear the a nice young man on the other end of the line. ‘I saw you called, what can I do for you?’ Now, that was service! Actually, the restaurant was fully booked, but he could cram a small table in, if we wouldn’t mind. Our expectations rose by the minute.

We arrived at seven o’clock at a small, plain looking restaurant. There were at most seven tables and every table was taken, except for a very small table close to the bar. A very open and friendly, Caucasian man welcomed us as if he had known us for his whole life. We ordered traditional Thai beer and studied on the menu, a piece of paper that had just come out of the printer. There were about 20 dishes on the menu, with prices around € 8,-. How cheap! Is this a snack bar? The place had an open kitchen and we were able to see a very petite Thai lady working like a Trojan. I ordered ‘fish in three flavours’, my husband choose the beef curry (his dish was expensive: € 10,-). 

Twenty minutes later our food arrived. And a few minutes after that, we entered heaven. We didn’t talk any more, we just ate. We both wanted to eat faster and faster and at the same time we didn’t want to run low on our meals, which was an extremely difficult standoff. As soon the bottom of our plates was in sight, we were overwhelmed by a feeling of disappointment. When the waiter arrived, we were licking our plates, ashamed, uncontrollably, completely helpless. Someone else made us do that, it was beyond ourselves. And when he asked: ‘Was everything all right?’ I’m afraid we gave him a retarded look. It was the most idiotic rhetorical question we had ever heard. It is that we had to catch the movies, otherwise I think we would have ordered another dish. 

When I paid the bill and my eyes glazed down the small saloon, I did a quick math and concluded: ‘I don’t understand how you can make a living out of this. Your prices are really too low.’ And then he told me how he met his wife in Thailand, how he brought her and mother over to The Netherlands, how the dishes are all authentic, prepared according to original Thai family recipes and how he thought the concept of his restaurant would eventually work out. He didn’t want to earn a lot of money, he just wanted to be happy. I insisted on my statement that he should really double his prices and that I would still think it was worth the deal. He replied: ‘Maybe once, but we are now fully booked every night and the clients are happy and that is why I do it.’ Needless to say that I left the restaurant with a very satisfied feeling and a lot of money unspent. And off course with the intention of coming back a lot of times.

Not so many weeks later, after mentioning the restaurant to a lot of people, when I wanted to take my children out to dinner, I went to the website to make reservations. There were a few new lines on the homepage: ‘As suggested we changed our concept. We hope to welcome you soon.’ It seemed directly addressed to me, and I felt a little honoured. That night, we were welcomed as old friends by the waiter. ‘Did you see that we changed our concept?’ he asked expectantly. ‘Yes I did, and how did it work out for you?’ I asked. ‘Well, I think it will take some time,’ he answered, showing me the nicest smile ever, which couldn’t conceal a hint of worry. It was already seven o’clock, and we were the first guests. When we left, two hours later – I had ordered the ‘fish in three flavours' again and although it hadn’t been as magical as the first time and I could resist to lick my plate it was still delightful- only one other table was taken. The bill was twice as high as the first time. ‘ Good for you,’ I said. ‘You really deserve to make a good living out of this place.’ ‘I know’ he said. ‘My wife is seven months pregnant and she works really hard in the kitchen. I hope we can afford to take some time off when the baby comes.’ 

Three weeks ago, on a Sunday evening, I didn’t feel like cooking and I suggested our family to go out the Thai. My suggestion was warmly received and we took off. As soon as we arrived, I realised I didn’t reserve a table for the five of us. Surprisingly, it hadn’t been necessary. We were the only guests. The printed menu contained less than ten items but thank god, the fish was still on it. Nevertheless, it took our friends more than an hour to serve dinner. I was hungry, shoved my fish in and forgot that once upon a time it brought me in heaven. My children compared the special Thai chicken wings with ‘chicken nuggets’ if the big M (Mam, why don’t we get a present?) and my husband stayed cranky that his beef curry had vanished from the menu.

Paying the bill, I asked Ed, as I knew him by now, if things had gotten better. ‘Well, it is hard. My wife is due in four weeks and we have a replacement chef, but that doesn’t work out fine. And the guests seem to have forgotten where we are.’ Ed looked a little nervous. ‘We will never forget you,’ I said firmly and I withstood the urge to hug him. In the car, back home, our clothes smelt awful. The eldest said: ‘We would have smelt the same way if we had put the fryer on at home’. 

Last week, I drove past the restaurant. On the window, there was a big sign. ‘For rent’. It hurt me like a knife. The fish in three flavours was blown away by sadness. The taste of remorse in three flavours.

Advice to a foreigner: don’t be surprised, just be amazed (Dutch saying)

Last week, Julie asked me:  ‘Have you read the Undutchables?’
‘Well, yes of course.’ Immediately the birthday party and the small toilets as two of the strangest Dutch peculiarities came to my mind.
‘And were you able to laugh about it?’
Of course, indeed. I think of myself as a person with a lot of self-reflection and self-criticism, and I’ve always doubted whether my ancestors were really Dutch.
Julie: ‘I met a lot of Dutch people who didn’t think it was funny at all.’

The reason for that is explained on the first page of The Undutchables, where  Dutch people are characterized as self-conceited, idle, judging, jealous, rude, stingy, tactless, undiplomatic  and generally impolite people. In short: narrow-minded people in an even narrower country.  

Julie went on: ‘Maybe you can write for you next assignment a piece on how ex-pats can survive strange Dutch customs.’

That put me into a difficult situation. Simply because I just can’t imagine how a foreigner must feel when he or she sets foot on our clay or moor grounds.  

When I read The Undutchables for the first time, every sentence hit me like a knife. I didn’t need any more conviction; this was a hundred per cent true. But I couldn’t have noticed it myself. I never felt like I lived in a doll’s house, everything being so petite, crowded and crammed, and I never questioned the our public transport manners. The only way to get a proper seat in the train is to join in with the pushing and shoving. 

Only from a foreigner’s point of view, we are sitting in a ‘circle of death’, a doctor’s waiting room, at a birthday party, ordering coffee and cake from the person who is celebrating his birthday by working his ass off. I always had a hunch it was kind of strange to say ‘gefeliciteerd’ to every guest already in this circle (I heard from an expat that he thought a girl introduced herself as Felicity and he was very confused when all the party guest seem to have the same name), but I never made that a point of discussion either.

I never thought of our toilets being claustrophobically small, and I never had any trouble to finds the thing that flushes it. 

I never realised that the bicycle is a nationwide conducted mascot, and that we derive our identity from it. Actually, we are busy making Holland a safe place for cyclists and it never occurs to us that non-cyclists could experience them as  dangerous high speed vehicle driving aliens. 

To make fun of a nation, foreigners are needed. They help us question the customs that we can’t even comprehend ourselves. For instance:  Carnaval and Sinterklaas. Need I say more? (I’m working on a piece that describes the customs, backgrounds, and history of the latter convention, but I can’t find synonyms to avoid the words ‘slavery’ and ‘dirty old man threatening little kids’.)

But due to the national character of the Dutch, it is difficult to laugh about ourselves. We are haughty and proud-hearted and we tend to patronize other cultures.  We are full of unsolicited advice and have an opinion on everything, as long as it has no consequences. And the few who thought Holland was too small, founded a new Holland in a bigger country, a painful remembrance of our colonial past.  

If you keep in mind how the Dutch think about themselves, it is really hard to believe that there is no country in the world that has the same unintellectual, shallow-brained,  sordid, distasteful, rancid, mouldy reality TV like Holland. For instance: Oh oh Gerso, The Villa, Brabantse Nachten. Even Booze Britain is civilized compared to these programs. Apparently, millions of people like to watch eight singles in a luxurious house with gallons of alcohol and camera’s everywhere. Let’s call this the Dutch paradox. 

I come to the conclusion that we are not the glorious nation we want it to be. My advice to foreigners? Have a big laugh. Find nationals of your own. Make fun of the Dutch. Write a bestseller. And after that: just blend in. To reassure you: it is possible to survive Holland without dying. Or maybe better: teach us your tricks. Because I can tell you: if you invite Dutch people over to the pub, you’re making friends. That is: if you pay the bill.

Do entertainers earn too much money?

This week’s writing task charged me with the instruction: you should spend about 40 minutes on this task. Write about the following topic:  Some people feel that entertainers (e.g. film stars, pop musicians or sports stars) are paid too much money. Do you agree or disagree?

My brains did overtime thinking about this writing task. First of all, since when exactly are sports stars entertaining people? I find nothing entertaining about sports, let alone soccer. The only thing that might be a little entertaining, are the comments after a disappointing match, and one of the soccer players says something like: ‘If you look at the chances we had then we didn’t have a lot of chances and although we had a lot of ball possession, that didn’t result in any more chances’ or ‘Yeah and then you were in the lead with 2-0 and then you  gave away that lead and then suddenly you have  2-2 on the scoreboard’.  Note that those soccer players always use the word ‘you’, but really, I didn’t do anything. But this is not entertaining, it’s embarrassing.  

This writing task at least brought me the insight of a paradox. The people I find entertaining, do not earn enough money. High quality stand-up comedians, like  Caroline Borgers,  Katinka Polderman and Kees Torn can hardly gather a good month salary with their ingenious songs and jokes. Circus artists have a hard time to get their pockets filled. Stage actors are usually poor people feeling the pinch, peddling with tickets for weeks and finally playing for three rows. But those people are entertainers.

So maybe we should drop the noun ‘entertainers’. Then the task will be about: Do I think that film stars, pop musician or sports stars are paid too much money? And what an indiscriminating question is that! A lot of pop musicians have side jobs like judging local talent scouts these days to feed their children, because all their songs are illegally distributed.  If we do not see a movie star for a long time, that is probably because he or she was in several b movies that were never shown on television, let alone in the movie theatres. And sports stars only earn a lot of money when they actually win a big tournament. All other days of the year they do tv commercials and wear ugly sponsor T-shirts to pay the mortgage.

So what is the question then? Do I think Wesley Sneijders earns too much money? Or Madonna? Or Oprah Winfrey? Look, I couldn’t care less. Those few have conquered the world, they influence people’s lives in a good way. So they are entitled to an amount of money in proportion to their impact. The more people know you, the more money you can ask for. That’s is the benefit of impact. The more impact you have, the more priceless you become. People who say that they are paid too much, will never have more impact than getting their son to do his homework. Which is a good thing, mind you, but if George Clooney said ‘Do your homework’ it might send hundreds of thousands sons all over the world behind their books. And that is why he should be paid a lot.

That leaves me with the question why bankers earn so much money. They are not famous, the only impact they have on people’s lives is that they make them feel robbed. And their level of entertainment is extremely low.

English lesson nr 3: Other effects of obesity

Last week, my writing task was to fill a page with 'Effects of obesity' or, if I would like 'Effects of childhood obesity'.  Now, we see the effects of obesity on every night on various tv channels, with or without stomach reduction surgery, peer pressure or fanatical fitness instructors. And to be honest: I never had any problems with my weight, so I can't speak from experience about it. But suddenly I realised that our family has a lot to do with it, but in a completely different way than I think this writing task wanted me to go. So I wrote this.

Other effects of obesity

Our nanny is probably the sweetest woman I know. She really loves our three daughters and they love her. Our nanny has been with us from the moment our youngest was born, for three years now and she’s at our home three days a week.  

Needless to say that the subject nanny is discussed a lot at home. But one aspect of our nanny will never be spoken of. We all pretend not to notice that she’s extremely obese. That’s peculiar, because we are used to make fun of all kinds of shapes; thin, tiny, short, long, bony, with fat arses or heavy bosom. But we’re silent about this aspect. I think that’s because we don’t want to put any ideas into the children’s  minds. I cannot imagine what would happen if one of them asks her: ‘Tell me, why are you so fat anyway, did you eat too many chocolates?’ Or even worse: ‘Maybe you shouldn’t eat so much, you’re fat already.’ She might quit her job. So we consistently avoid the subject. 

That’s not always easy. Last year, we bought a new couch. The purple colossus was delivered and that evening we were a happy family, watching television all together, inaugurating our new centre of the household. One day later, in the evening, I sat down on the couch again. But it didn’t feel comfortable at all. Strange, because the day before I had almost fallen asleep due to all its comfort. So I got up and inspected  the right side of the couch. While I was doing that, my eight year old daughter walked into the living room and said, in passing: ‘You shouldn’t use that part any more. That’s the spot the nanny likes to sit.’ 

It’s absolutely marvellous how our children picked up the code of not talking about it. They are always asking the most embarrassing things to anyone anywhere in the street but they never ask the nanny anything about her size. To be quite frank, I would like to know. How come she’s so obese? Was she like this when she got married? What happened? How does she feel about it herself? I even spied on her when she was eating. But I could never bust her on bulimic excesses. She never even eats candy. It’s a big mystery, literally. There was a time that I secretly hoped that one of the girls would ask her thé question, just out of curiosity. But they are never going to, programmed as they are by their parents. 

One day, we came home and one of the dinner chairs was broken. We asked the nanny what happened and immediately bit our tongues of because we put her in a compromising position. She explained that the chair had broken; she felt awful and asked her husband to come over to glue the parts together, in vain. In the week after that, another chair broke.  We hurried to a furniture store and bought new ones, heavy quality, to withhold another embarrassing situation from her. The next day, when she arrived, we ate our breakfast while we were all sitting on our new chairs and we felt a little awkward. Our ten year old - a girl that weighs not even 30 kilo - apparently felt our tension and said to the nanny: ‘Look, we bought new chairs, the others ones were of such bad quality. Yesterday I  sat down on one and I broke it completely.’ 

The same tall 30 kilo weighing ten year old might have a little problem with her weight herself. Sometimes, she stands in front of the mirror, counting the bones in the chest and it worries us that she seems to be proud of it. I’m encouraging her to eat more, but it is a struggle. One day, when we had an argument again over dinner, I was angry and  I broke the code. I asked her: ‘Why don’t you eat? Are you afraid that you are going to look like our nanny?’ She looked at me and said, furiously: ‘Are you suggesting our nanny is fat? Well, she’s not. She’s only curvaceous.’