Our Translators
At the time of writing Andy Murray is through to the semi-finals at Wimbledon, and yet I don’t think he will win Wimbledon. Maybe I’m wrong, but I always get a bit depressed when watching Murray. Even on a blissfully sunny day he looks as if he’s expecting rain, and his mother sits like a small angry cloud in the players’ stand.
Last Saturday I went to a reunion. I can just hear my friends say: ‘But you never go to reunions!’ That’s right: normally you wouldn’t find me at such an event. Death is the guest of honour at most reunions. But I went as my mother’s wheelchair-pusher.
I recently visited Cape Town to attend a book launch. I’d been looking forward to it. ‘Cape Town’ my acquaintances sighed with a hint of jealousy, as if they saw a faraway vision, but I was also thinking about flying for twelve hours in economy class.
A few years ago, I was looking at Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar from a windswept Tarifa in Southern Spain. Africa looked enormous and I felt minuscule, like the grain of sand in Ingrid Jonker’s poem.
It has been a bad week for disco: Robin Gibb, one of the Bee Gees, and ‘disco queen’ Donna Summer passed away. I’m nearly fifty, so you could say I’m one of the disco children. I turned 15 in 1977, the year in which the film Saturday Night Fever was a smash hit. Those could be called my glorious years: I still had a full head of hair.
David Cameron sometimes signed his emails to Rebekah Brooks, former editor of the News of the World tabloid, with LOL. David was under the impression that it meant Lots of Love.
In those days I often climbed onto the roof of the hospital, sometimes alone, but often with my friend Ewout. It was a kind of addiction.
By Jeroen Blokhuis published in English & Dutch
We love to meet our readers in the North West
I recently watched an interview on BBC Breakfast with a representative of the Cloud Appreciation Society and the author of a book called Clouds That Look Like Things.
Closing date midnight (GMT) 31 Dec 2012 – Shortlist 31 January 2013 – Awards ceremony 27 February 2013
During the past few weeks I’ve frequently been reminded of the 1634–1637 tulip mania. In the early seventeenth century, French ladies at court would pay hundreds of guilders for a tulip flower, which they wore in their décolleté at gala evenings; a wonderful image.
Most royal families are just a tiny bit common: witness their preference for fast cars, planes, yachts, hunting, firearms, money, hydrogen peroxide, extramarital affairs and villas in sunny countries, though not necessarily in this order.
I stayed in London last week and came across a lot of Berties: boys with ambitious mothers. The Berties in London all have scooters, and are mainly busy trying to escape.
When visiting London I always stay with family near Paddington. After arriving by Eurostar I travel by tube from King’s Cross–St Pancras to Paddington. For the Olympic Games the names of these stations will be changed to Nadia Comaneci and Lionel Messi.
I know two people whose first name is Engelbert – well, one I really know and the other I know from TV. One is a former colleague from my time in the army, and although he is nearly seven feet tall, his name is not so heroic.
There are people who think it’s odd that a coach crash in Switzerland which killed 28 Dutch and Belgian passengers, including 22 children, receives more attention than a similar accident that took place in Africa, involving African victims. They ask, ‘Aren’t both events equally awful?’
The other day, a man was attacked by a fox just outside Tesco in Orpington, Kent. Even though the man was an imposing civil servant, the fox wasn’t put off, because it was after his shopping bags. In the end, the civil servant gave it a garlic baguette.
Money, class and one overwhelming (forbidden) emotion!
Recently, as part of Jewish Book Week, I went to a discussion about
religion and science. Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and atheist and
mathematician Marcus du Sautoy were the speakers.
In Aigle, Switzerland, the Frenchman Robert Marchand recently set the cycling world hour record for riders over one hundred years old. He finished at 24.25 kilometres. This made me want to interview this man and it reminded me of The 100-year-old, a short story by the Dutch author Godfried Bomans (1913–1971).
One of the most difficult things in life is to say something meaningful
after someone has died, especially if you knew the person. Unfortunately
Paris Hilton knows everybody and announced to the world: ‘So sad to hear the news about Whitney Houston.’
We wish all our readers a happy Valentine’s Day. This is a description of the happiest (Valentine) day in Hedwig’s life.
‘Are you collecting Muppet points?’ asked the checkout assistant at my local supermarket. ‘Well,’ I muttered, ‘Am I a man or a Muppet?’
Sergei Polunin is just twenty-one and was the youngest ever principal at the Royal Ballet. Yet this week he announced that he no longer wanted to dance for them and was resigning with immediate effect. That’s what I want to discuss this week.
I already knew two Margaret Thatchers, but recently another one has been added. Now it’s a case of three Margaret Thatchers. It’s not that they continually hit me over the head with a handbag, but they are powerful women.
Never one to miss a play on words, the Sun ran this headline during the past week: ‘I’ve been Edam fool but I’ll be Gouda from now on’, obviously referring to Dutch cheese.
You may have played party games by the Christmas tree with aunt Mathilda, but I spent the festive season with 902 family members! Well, it seemed as if I was spending my time in 902 living rooms; a fascinating spectacle.
I rather pity the Higgs boson. As far as I understand it, this particle flies back and forth like a madman but no one can see it. The most it amounts to is a spike in the ‘background noise’.
Following the talks in Brussels, the front page of The Times showed David Cameron as Manneken Pis aiming at the head of Nicolas Sarkozy, and the next day someone remarked to me that Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel reminded her of Punch and Judy.
Last week I read somewhere that Pippa Middleton is having an identity crisis. Apparently she is finding it difficult to accept that people think of her as ‘Kate’s sister’.
I was twelve years old when I attended my first and only live football match. The football club NEC was playing against the mighty Ajax in my home town of Nijmegen.
Looking forward to something is often better than the event itself. Take skating: it looks very enjoyable when watching it on TV. When you actually stand on the thin blades, you immediately feel the strain on your ankles. After a couple of laps you can no longer feel your legs from the knee down. Skating on natural ice also induces the first stages of frostbite.
It all started immediately after crossing the border, as I was travelling back home from London by train the other day.
This week I’m off to London again. As you read this, I’m probably already there. I’m regularly asked for tips on great places in London. ‘The Polish barmaid at The Mitre,’ is, of course, not the right answer.
The Occupy Wall Street Protest is a flash-mob that camps out. It’s as if the neighbours come round for a cup of coffee and end up sleeping over.
It’s Monday 10 October and within the next few minutes they’ll announce the winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics. Strictly speaking economics isn’t a science otherwise things would have been going better by now.
Featured in Angel, a new novel launched on 27 October
I read this week that the Dutch are most worried about ‘the way in which we live together’. Of course the ‘we’ are other people. At the same time it transpired that 55% of the Dutch think that people who smoke or drink should pay a higher health care premium. This makes me think about emigrating.
I recently ran a workshop on making love. Before you get the wrong end of the stick, it was about how this act is portrayed in literature. I could have called it Sex in Literature, but that sounds rather coarse.
Join the launch party at Paddington Library
It was a special day when my mother moved home. She had lived in her old house for fifty years, my sisters and I were born there, and that’s where my father had died. The day was 11 September 2001.
It’s a well-known fact that it’s often pouring with rain in certain parts of the UK. Whereas it’s raining cats and dogs in England, it’s raining pipe stems in the Netherlands. I would like to suggest that in Scotland it’s raining ‘cows and horses’.
It was so busy at the Edinburgh Festival that my publisher and I had to book into Pollock Halls, the student halls of residence. Plain but pleasant rooms with a view of Arthur’s Seat, their only disadvantage was a haphazard wireless contact with the outside world.
I was born in 1962 and in secondary school some of our teachers were ‘anti-money’. This was then very modern. They often had beards and reeked of unwashed socks. Luckily they smoked during class, so we couldn’t smell the teacher.
‘You can’t live on nostalgia,’ someone told my publisher last Saturday on Portobello Market. They were talking about The Travel Bookshop, which is for sale. Yes indeed, Hugh Grant’s shop in the film Notting Hill.
I have always been interested in sociological phenomena. For example, this week I pondered why the Chinese do not close their mouths when eating. You don’t gain anything, but it is one of those things that strike you when you move in public places.
What is the difference between Julian Assange, responsible for WikiLeaks, and Andy Coulson, David Cameron’s former communications chief and ex-editor of the News of the World? Many people will consider one a hero and the other a villain. Papers that published juicy details from WikiLeaks now shed crocodile tears over the British hacking scandal.
Rumour has it that Charlene Wittstock tried to run away just before her marriage. Albert allegedly phoned the airport trying to stop her. ‘Hello, this is Albert speaking, please stop my fiancée!’ But don’t we all know a Charlene moment? When life grabs you by the throat.
I think I am just a normal guy but many people may well consider me rather crazy. Let me give you a few examples.
I was on my way to a symposium about poetry and religion at Radboud University in Nijmegen, less than a kilometre from where I was born. It all began in the shuttle bus from the station to the campus, which was full of girls.
‘Would you consider yourself a green?’ Fiona Bruce asked in an interview to celebrate Prince Philip’s ninetieth birthday. Prince Philip’s mouth resembled that of Kermit the Frog before he answered, ‘There’s a difference between being concerned for the conservation of nature and being a bunny hugger.’
The advent of social media has increasingly shortened the lifespan of news. What is news today is forgotten tomorrow. Had Jesus been crucified now, he would have been a trending topic on Twitter for just one day.
The other day, in the centre of Arnhem, I ran into footballer Theo Janssen. He was wearing sunglasses but even so I recognised him; his tattoos gave him away.
‘Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the Bill Clinton of the IMF’, I read recently. Poor Bill Clinton, it makes what he did seem even worse, because a derivative is always weaker than the original.
There was a time when countries showed each other some goodwill during the Eurovision Song Contest; when I, a seven-year-old, watched TV and was very much in love with Dana (All Kinds of Everything) from Ireland. Nowadays the song contest resembles a continuation of war by alternative means.
In the early morning of 30 April, I am walking with my publisher along the deserted Notting Hill streets. It is the start of a new endeavour: taking publishing to Portobello Market. Holland Park Press’s premises are within walking distance.
It is not always such a bad idea to hide in a kitchen cupboard, especially not when a doctor has just told your mother the results of an important medical test.
For years my sister has been earmarking hats for my wedding; proper hats, not fascinators. A fascinator is one of these tiny concoctions worn at a jaunty angle on one’s head. They are very popular at the moment because they show off the hairdo.
Fifteen-year-old Regina Mayer from the village of Laufen in Southern Germany has succeeded in making Luna the cow jump like a horse. Her farmer parents refused to give her a horse, so she simply saddled one of their cows. After a bit of effort, she managed to teach the cow to jump over a fence.
A new poetry competition to celebrate the publication of Angel.