Magazine

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.

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.