By Arnold Jansen op de Haar

Don’t worry, I’m fully dressed, in my own clothes. Unlike Gerrit Zalm, CEO of ABN AMRO bank, who during his bank’s New Year receptions appeared as Priscilla, his sister, clad in a blue dress and sporting Dame Edna glasses.

They had even distorted Gerrit’s voice. This hadn’t worked out well, because Gerrit sounded like a Dalek, one of the robots from Doctor Who. ‘Exterminate!’

He had impersonated Gerrit Zalm’s brother before, and now he was Gerrit Zalm’s sister. The following characters are being planned for future years: Gerrit Zalm’s dog and Gerrit Zalm as his Dutch namesake, a salmon.

It nearly slipped my mind to tell you that ‘Gerrit’s sister’ posed as a prostitute. She compared the bank with a brothel. ‘Women on top, that’s our motto!’ She also pointed out the similarities between acting as a front and back office. That’s the end of your triple A rating. Dutch PM Mark Rutte has already been on the phone to fellow party member Gerrit to ask if he could borrow the dress, ‘To wear in Sochi.’

‘Women on top.’ Should we suggest to Lord Rennard that he appears in a glitzy blue dress in the House of Lords? He’s being attacked for inappropriate behaviour. Only, don’t mention anything about a front and back office, because this will annoy Nick Clegg.

However, back to the bathtub. The sea level is rising and the Netherlands is sinking. The lowest point is Niewerkerk aan den IJssel at 6.76 metres below sea level. Louis XIV called the Netherlands ‘a deposit of French and German rivers’, but we are getting increasingly better at removing the sediment.

The Dutch and English weather are very similar. The English weather appears one day later in the Netherlands. But flooding is very rare in the Netherlands due to all the dykes and pumping stations.

In the province of Zeeland (Sea Land), the name says it all, the Delta Works dams and dykes are so efficient that there is no flooding at all. There are no longer any new deposits of sand and clay, so the land compacts. The ground is in danger of becoming increasingly salty. And areas outside the dykes, such as the Verdronken Land van (drowned land of) Saeftinghe, get increasingly higher.

Half the Netherlands is sinking. In the province of Groningen, the amount of gas extracted is large enough to make the ground sink. This triggers earthquakes, and they are getting bigger. So the cabinet sent Trade and Industry Secretary Henk Kamp to Groningen with a bag of money. Plus the promise to extract less gas.

The earthquakes won’t disappear immediately, this will take another two years. There are already engineers at work on plans to replace the extracted gas with CO2 or steam. But these studies, too, will last for some time.

The decrease in gas extraction only relates to the area around the most heavily affected village, Loppersum. It’s the kind of village that lists its bus routes on Wikipedia. Number 45 bus: Loppersum – Zeerijp -’t Zandt – Spijk – Holwierde – Delfzijl – Appingedam.

The names are lovely in Groningen, even to Dutch people, take De Langeleegte (The Long Emptiness), the stadium of bankrupt football club Veendam. Or the hamlet Hongerige Wolf (Hungry Wolf), the home of writer Richard Klinkhamer, who murdered his wife, turned her into mincemeat, and wrote a book about it: Woensdag Gehaktdag (Wednesday is Mincemeat Day).

People from Groningen are famously down to earth. A friend from Groningen once told me that he had never kissed his father. ‘Fathers don’t kiss their sons in Groningen, they shake hands.’
To attract tourists they once thought up the slogan: ‘There is nothing better north of Groningen.’ No, the North Pole is north of Groningen.

But when Henk Kamp turned up in Groningen, it nearly turned into the Battle of Loppersum. They started to hammer on the windows of the venue in which the meeting took place, and two farmers threatened to level the place with their tractors.

Until recently, the Frisians were the Dutch Scots, but they’ve been joined by people from Groningen. All of the Northern part of the Netherlands would actually prefer to become independent, and use all the income from gas for themselves. But this money would be much better used to provide extra protection against the sea. Maybe next time, Henk Kamp should appear in a lovely blue dress.

© Arnold Jansen op de Haar
© Translation Holland Park Press