I’ve been out and about in Amsterdam, which really means hopping between cafes and bars, trying not to catch a cold in between. In fact I caught a cold on Sunday afternoon walking round Vondelpark – it was such a long walk, and an immersion experience in Dutch social behaviour, mainly bicycles, families, couples and ease.
Vondelpark
The Dutch seem so easy, so relaxed, so carefree, so comfortable within their bodies. I’m always confronted by my Englishness when I come here. I love the Amstel river and a cafe on it called de Ysbreeker just up from where the Prinzegracht feeds into the river. And there’s a lovely old brewery on the Herengracht where it gets narrower as it nears the dam.
Today is a blustery old day though, some storm sweeping in from the north – glad I’m not landing at Schipol. The author in the book I’m reading has just come across something his father wrote in a student magazine when he was 18, and he wants to give his father some advice and correct the article! What advice I would have given my father?
There was an op-ed article in the NYT at the weekend written by David Brooks about Selfism. He often writes about social psychology and I thought he was describing a new development from the judgemental critical super-ego (Old Testament god) and ego-ideal (Christianity) to a non-judgemental meaningfulness of the self. I was beginning to think this was very interesting until I suddenly realised he was being completely ironic and mocking the snow-flake generation (and Trump as well). I felt so stupid and gullible that I hadn’t spotted the irony straight away, but then kept coming back to the article and ended up thinking it was cleverly ambiguous. I was hoping that it offered a new way to transcend guilt and shame and all those legacies of religion within our culture (and our psyche).
I watched ABC Murders, which had a very clever plot. Poiret’s obsessional attention to detail is like a smoke-screen to his Freud-like speculative reasoning which in some fictional way always leads him to find the perpetrator. His Catholicism was interesting too.