By Arnold Jansen op de Haar

I’m rather quick to show compassion. For example, you walk past a school playground just when it’s break time. Obviously, there’s always a child that’s separate from the group. This one is trudging all alone through the fallen leaves in a corner. That’s when I take pity. Not that I was a child to be pitied. I was quite popular at school. So what brings this on?

When I was a youngster and I came across a child with a lazy eye – you remember, a child with an eye patch, and who was bullied a lot – I would befriend it. Quite likely that would stop the bullying. Besides, Marcel K took on my fights for me. He was in my class and rather big.

I can even pity an entire country; take Belgium, for example, with its higgledy-piggledy houses, the language confusion and the general European hatred of ‘Brussels’. I, too, would start brewing as many different kinds of beer as possible.

I have a similar feeling for the woman who sells the Dutch version of The Big Issue outside my local supermarket. She sits there every day, except Sundays, from eight o’clock in the morning to ten at night. There must be a good reason for doing this. She always used to wave at me, and once a week I gave her two euros.

A few weeks ago, I suddenly got fed up with this. It seemed as if she greeted me less enthusiastically on the days I didn’t give her anything. Actually, she seemed to just like my money, and I discovered that her entire Bulgarian family is stationed near supermarkets across the city.

The man who sits outside the train station with his accordion every day needs retraining too. He’s probably one of the family. Every time I pass him he starts playing If I Were a Rich Man with gusto.

In recent weeks the woman outside the supermarket started looking increasingly angrily at me. We no longer said hello. I felt like someone who doesn’t donate anything to the victims in the Philippines because ‘charities take too big a share’. I actually don’t donate anything, but that’s because I’m a good cause myself. (You can buy a book.)

So I began to avoid her. The supermarket has a back entrance. To reach it you have to walk through the department store next door and take the lift to the multi-storey car park to reach the long corridor which takes you to the supermarket. The same on your way out. The odd thing is that I now think about the old lady even more than when I used to give her something.

In any case, I find elderly ladies very moving. When I spot one out shopping in the city centre, it reminds me of my mother. When, at the supermarket checkout, one such elderly lady slowly tries to retrieve coins with her rheumatic fingers from a purse that is too small, and the queue begins to get annoyed, I feel like shouting: ‘You probably still have an elderly mum to visit at Christmas. That’s right! This year, for the first time, I haven’t, you fools!’

Sometimes I have less compassion. Recently, in the Netherlands, there was a big fundraising campaign for the Philippines. The singer Trijntje Oosterhuis was going to donate one euro for each like of her Philippines Appeal page. This got out of hand: in no time the counter showed 250,000 euros. Trijntje was out of pocket. Trijntje’s appeal turned out to be a rather small affair, but she would give ‘generously’.

I also have little compassion for the French weather woman who said she would appear naked if the French national football squad beat the Ukraine. Against the expectations of the weather presenter, ‘Les Bleus’ won. Next to the chart with the overview of the French weather, they showed a video of the French weather woman running naked through a field. It was filmed from a distance, but even so.

So now I’m watching BBC Breakfast every morning in the hope that Carol Kirkwood will take on a similar bet. I’m not sure how Bill Turnbull is going to survive it, though.

© Arnold Jansen op de Haar
© Translation Holland Park Press