Days like these

Blogging has not been a big priority recently. I spend too much time behind my PC already – running a business, coping with what seems like unnecessarily large amounts of administration (much of it in a foreign language) and sometimes just doing fun things (like playing around with last.fm ). But yeah a whole month has gone by and I might lose readers.

So here are the highs and lows of this month. And I will try harder next month (I’ve been saying that to my Dutch teacher all year).

Highs
1. I finally got to take my Dutch (NT2) state exams. These will officially give me the level of fluency needed to apply to work as a pizza delivery boy. I’m moving up in the world! It also means I get about eight hours a week of my life back (not going to classes and doing homework). But I didn’t quite finish them all. I missed one. I got there late. And for once it wasn’t my fault. There was a ‘collision’ on the rail network (I think that’s a Dutch euphemism for ‘someone threw themselves in front of a train’). No trains to Utrecht for who knows how long (it turned out to be less than an hour). So I had to phone the central office of the exam committee and tell them that I was going to be late, etc. I vene got past the menu that told me ‘alle onze medewerekers zijn in gespreek’ (‘all our operatives are busy right now’) - one of the first phrases I learned in Dutch. That afternoon in my speaking exam we got a question: ‘you are going to work and your train unexpectedly stops. You have to call your boss and tell him you will be late. What do you say?’ Bang on! Real life imitates (and prepares you) for exams. Though it was possibly the first useful ‘situation exercise’ I had to face in fifteen months of studying Dutch. (Read Dave’s hilarious blog about being asked what to do when you get pregnant). There’s something about these free Dutch classes that is incredibly patronising – and in stark contrast with British culture (confident in its linguistic hegemony) which will provide health and administrative advice in 27 different languages (I kid you not - the 2011 census form was available in at least that many languages).

Going to the exam centre was something of an anthropological excursion. You could see the people whose future in the Netherlands depended on their linguistic skills (I could say oral skills – but for reasons that will become obvious - that would be a hugely inappropriate choice of adjectives) . Let’s just say that a fair number were drop-dead gorgeous young women of south Asian, African, Caribbean and Eastern Europe descent, the majority of whom were chaperoned by gentlemen ‘of a certain age’, most with white hair (if any) and some with walking sticks. It put me in mind of a Beatles song: ‘Money can’t buy me love.’ True, but perhaps it can provide a little comfort in one’s dotage

2. I’ve never really participated in ‘Queen’s Day’ celebrations before. I’m a Republican (in the English sense as opposed to the American or Irish one). So I find the idea of celebrating an outmoded feudal institution to be distasteful (to say the least). But, with the encouragement of a friend, I agreed to participate in this Queen’s Day celebrations. We agreed to do a stall together to sell horticultural produce – which felt a bit like selling coal to Newcastle. So in March I started making little trays of mixed herbs – trays about 3cm * 12cm, with a mix of 6 or so kitchen herbs to transplant into balcony boxes. In March and April I diligently transported them in and out of my flat – to catch the sun in the day and protect them against the frost at night. I had forty or so trays – with a few marigolds thrown in to add some colour. And I sold the lot! It wasn’t so much the money was important. It was more selling something that people really enjoyed buying – my customers ranged from eco-conscious students to equally turned-on grandmothers (but were conspicuously female). A fair few customers were acquaintances from the nine (long) years I have spent here – but many didn’t speak English at all – so I had to sell my concept in Dutch – a good exercise for the exams to come the following week.

My friend, in the meantime, did a roaring trade in selling marijuana seeds. He had a few plants on display and was knocking out bags of seeds like nobody’s business. Again it was another strange anthropological experience – seeing who buys, and wants to grow weed- not all restricted to the age / cultural group you might expect!

Most of the stallholders were kids – and I wonder if the real purpose of Queen’s Day is not to inculcate ‘the trading gene’ into the Dutch youth at a young age.

3. I’ve got a new flat – at least temporarily, for the summer- four times the size (at just twice the cost) as mine – and with a garden – and in Brussels. I don’t know if its going to be a prolonged French speaking, French eating, European culture enjoying (working) vacation or the start of a new phase in my life – but I feel incredibly happy about the prospect of it – even though I haven’t yet found someone to sub-rent my chicken coop flat in Wageningen. More to follow on this topic I’m sure.


4. Finally a note of gratitude to the banking system. There may be a lot wrong with it (I should put some radical link in here) but they are very good at detecting fraud. I was happily sitting at a seminar on Fair Trade in my adopted town when I got a message from my English bank asking me if I was in Nepal and had made five cash withdrawals today. The answer to both questions was no. They had picked it up within a few hours. The worrying point from a consumer point of view is that I have never used that card on the internet and only very occasionally use it to withdraw cash or buy petrol. Somewhere, somehow, someone ‘skimmed it.’ But the opportunities were very few. How do banks keep up with that level of sophistication – and trust their customers?

Lows
Let’s not dwell on them. I got stood up twice in one weekend, and that made it difficult to pick up the baton on Monday morning. But it wasn’t much worse than that.

Drowning in paper

Yesterday I sent a pound (weight) of paper to the Court of Protection in the UK detailing all the expenditure and income (and copies of all the relevant bank statements) made on my father's behalf in the past twenty months. Just when I thought I might catch up with my my life, my Dutch admin and even turn my thoughts to finding things that I want to do this weekend, another 250g of forms arrive from the solicitors relating to the sale of the flat. Another fun weekend ahead.

Rattling my cage.

Who's been rattling my cage? That's what I want to know!
The last few weeks have been full of ups and downs. In November I was promised a big contract for the coming year - payable in advance (this is not uncommon as projects sometimes have budget deadlines which expire before all the reports, articles and books have been written). I took this as a green light to go ahead with my calendar, made a final selection of images, commissioned the designer etc (see recent previous blogs). The first week in December I get an apologetic e mail saying that the project has no budget left and cannot follow this order through.

I spent a few hours doing sums and the figures looked red - blood red. I had a sleepless night and realised my only safe option was to pull out from printing and posting the calendar. Having already selected the artwork and commissioned the designer I've gone for a pdf version instead. You can download it from here. And here's a preview of the cover.
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In the two weeks following this decision I got an unexpected (and substantial) tax rebate and a stream of work offers that kept me busy for two weekends in a row and until 11 o clock on Tuesday night (to meet a last deadline) and have filled my work schedule for the first three weeks of January. The last quarter of the year is always the busiest for me. This year it waited until the 5th December to kick in and make the difference.

This storm of work was accompanied by having to get my car through its road test (not too painful) the cold snap (which completely drained its battery) and the fraught process of exchanging my UK driver's licence (with a recently expired photocard) for a Dutch one (that's a story for another time - but it had a happy ending).

So the calendar might have worked (financially) - but the ice was too thin. I learnt that while the calendar might be a good way of profiling my business it is also a bit of an indulgence - an expensive and time consuming one. I hope not too many readers or clients will be disappointed at receiving a pdf this year as opposed to a fat envelope and glossy calendar. And, if you are reading this and are on the calendar mailing list please let me know if you download the file. It will save me from sending a few emails in the coming days / weeks.

I don't think my artist has wholly forgiven me for downgrading the project at the last minute although have come to an 'understanding'. It will cheer her up if you visit her website - as she is hoping for lots more traffic this year though this collaboration.

Having had the earth move (not in the enjoyable sense) so much under my feet in the past few weeks I have hardly made any preparations for Christmas: time to head to the shops and put up the Christmas lights. Festive greetings to you all.

past, present and future

This is going to be an unusual weekend. On Friday I am going take a little trip back in time and go to revisit the mothership. Gong, that cult band of the 1970s, (they define the term cult band as a band loved too much by too few people) are back on tour- with just one date in the NL. I'm going to be there and, while I won't be playing any rounds of Laughing Sam's Dice, it will be interesting to take one more trip on the light fantastic. Jazzy, avant-garde, anarchistic and mystic - all in one package - they were the band that defined my mis-spent youth.

The first time I saw them I was still a schoolboy. They were playing one of those wonderful free gigs in Hyde Park and someone even had the wits to take a photo. As you can see, even by the standards of those days (circa '75-76) they were unashamedly part of the counterculture.
The other bands to grace the stage that day included Kevin Coyne, Chapman Whitney Streetwalkers (with Roger Chapman previously of Family) and the very shorted lived super-group that consisted of Kevin Ayers, John Cale, Nico and Brian Eno (yes I can say I saw Nico perform live-ish!)- Mike Oldfield was guest guitarist with the band if I remember rightly.

But it was Gong that caught our (pre-psychedelicised) imagination. They had a constantly changing line-up, in part caused by so many band members being banned from different countries for various narcotic infringements and insurgent activities. (It's a tradition that, it seems, they haven't given up- recently Daevid Allen - now a spritely 71 years old- was removed from a poetry festival in Queensland, because of reciting a poem that repeatedly invoked the profane / sacred F word).

I used to travel all over the South of England to see them whenever they were on tour. Shit, one night we drove from London to Bath and back - on a weekday- to see them, getting home at 3am and went to work (sort of) the next day. The best memories (if one can call them that) were of a few gigs they played at the Hammersmith Palais (immortalised by the Clash), one of the most beautiful, yet improbable rock venues I ever visited.

One summer the NME ran an essay competition to recruit a new journalist (oh my dream job in those days) and I spent most of an entire month's vacation house sitting a flat in Paris writing about the significance and earth shattering importance of this band. (The joint winners turned out to be Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill who crafted a piece about Patti Smith's Horses). There's a line in a "Cindy Lee Beryhill song: "God made obscurity for safety reasons" I think I am happy that I didn't grow up in the public eye. Anyway, tomorrow I am going to go and relive all those youthful flights of fancy.

Most of the rest of the weekend is going to be spent in church. Yes I know, call the nurse. A Buddhist colleague of mine was invited to arrange a presentation about the Buddhist take on "Mystic power in daily life" at her local church. Naturally, her local Buddhist colleagues have all rallied around and helped build a really good (well it remains to be seen) hour-long presentation with a small play about Nichiren Buddhism , drawn from the Lotus Sutra, a short lecture and an excellent DVD. It's a double challenge for me: appearing on stage, AND, doing a ten line speech in Dutch. Well why not push yourself??

Finally to cap it all - on Sunday afternoon I have been invited to attend an introductory afternoon of an "entrepreneurial boot camp", as a (successful) member of Wageningen's entrepreneurial community, appearing alongside CEOs and Directors of local hi-tech companies. OK I'll go along for the ride and see what I can offer - although it might be a bit subversive - maybe that's what they're looking for....

So in one weekend I seemed destined to travel from 'pot-head' to 'bread-head.' And I am wondering if my entire human evolution is being shrunk into one weekend and that now is a real testing time for me to reconcile these different positions that my life has led me to adopt and to make some coherent sense of them all

In absentia

No intention to not blog for a month- I just got very busy. My planned two week stay in England turned into three weeks, as I was making such progress it felt a waste to lose the momentum. In that time winter has turned to spring and I have completely emptied and cleaned my father's flat, got it redecorated and recarperted - the decorator said that the flat smelt better after I got rid of the last (and most detoriated) carpets. At the same time I have been trying to keep my business on a level kilter- keeping one major (and intellectually demanding) project on the go and picking up on four or five new clients' requests. Also "processing stuff" about where my life / career etc came from and where they are going - how 'love let me down' and how, in what feels like, an emotional wildernesss, I might find the time, energy and motivation to try again. That hasn't left me much time to blog about the relative merits of the UK / NL public transport systems etc. etc.

Some of these issues (especially the last) still need to be resolved. My stay in the NL is teaching me so much about efficiently managing the resources that are available to me, yet at the same time offers me so little inspiration about how to relax, enjoy my life and not let work and money dominate my life. That's a paradox - because one of the things that attracted me here was the laid back attitude of Dutch people to work, with most people in my circles not working Fridays. Seems like I have way longer to go get these things in balance. Listening to and supporting others going through similar growing pains helps this process.

Nobody told me there would be days like these

Every two weeks, or so, I have a “transit day” when I shift from my base from one flat, in one country, to another flat in a different country. They are preceded by booking a definitive airline ticket, running down the contents of the fridge in the flat where I am staying, working out what paperwork and clothes I need to transport from one base to the other. Planning, planning, planning.

And the days themselves are always very long and demanding (and require a half-day’s recuperation at the other end). They involve cleaning out the fridge – saving what can be saved to the freezer –giving away what can’t be saved to the neighbours, emptying and cleaning all the bins, making sure nothing is going to smell or look horrible when I return, ensuring that all the required paperwork is packed, the mobiles charged, the heating and water heating turned down to a minimal, but freeze-proof, level, etc. etc.

Yesterday’s exodus was particularly fretful. I read in the Guardian that it was likely to be one of the busiest days of the year at Heathrow and realised that the local traffic was likely to be heavy on the last Saturday before Xmas, so decided to give an extra hour to get to Heathrow. Well the traffic wasn’t unusually busy, nor was Heathrow, but my flight was delayed by an hour. So I ended up spending a very lengthy period in the (completely non-smoking) departures lounge. The delay meant that my carefully calibrated schedule would not get me get me back to Wageningen in order to do a supermarket shop (because, like Wales fifteen years ago, nothing in non-urban areas of the Netherlands opens on a Sunday). So I had to do an emergency shop (milk, bread, fruit, wine and two days worth of pre-cooked meals) at an (overpriced) airport convenience supermarket, adding another 5 or so kilos to my already over loaded baggage. Then, atypically, my first train back was cancelled - so instead of the 7.5 hours that I have got these trips honed down to, this one took almost 10 hours.

Back home and there’s two weeks worth of mail catch up on. Done now, but I’m still in recovery-mode after the transit process – and wondering how, and with whom, I am going to spend Xmas, my fiftieth birthday and the New Year. At this time of year, when our culture rams home the importance of celebrating with friends, family and loved ones, I can’t help but thinking that something is missing from my life. A one person-size portion of turkey just doesn’t feel right. I have to be really strong over the next two weeks.

It ain't what you want (it's what you need)

My blogging has been lax recently. The past few weeks have bought a few disappointments that I have had to take time to absorb. Several weeks ago I was approached to write a report about smallholder farming in Africa. I agreed but argued that the contract should also budget in a trip to a relevant conference (two of which were about to occur in Nigeria and Ethiopia). The sponsors agreed in principle, thinking it would add colour to the report, but then pulled back when they realised they didn’t have enough funds to cover such an excursion. I was pretty annoyed –especially as I had told myself, a long time ago- not to accept any such contracts unless they offer funds for field work. More annoyed recently as the value of the pound has collapsed and the value of this contract has decreased by about 20% - but hey that’s weatherable if this is going to be an important learning and networking experience.

A couple of weeks later I was invited to apply for (one of a number of vacancies in) a housing co-op, which happens to be one of the nicest living arrangements that I have found in the Netherlands. I really felt that my boat might have come in and I might finally have found somewhere environmentally pleasing and socially supportive to live in. I even told some friends that i was hoping to move out of my small gardenless and noisy flat next year. Two days before they had their screening process I was told that my ex (and her new boyfriend) had also applied to live there. This raised more than a few emotional issues for me, as I felt less than happy about the prospect of living ‘all under the same roof’ as her (them). As it turned out I didn’t make it onto their short list, so didn’t have to deal with that problem.

Coming on top of each other, in the space of two weeks or so, these two ‘failures’ quite upset me. I asked myself why ‘I don’t get anything I want’. A few days reflection and quite a lot of chanting later, I realised that it was probably some form of protection. My life at the moment is hyper busy, with not enough time to organise the flights, hotels and upgraded immunisations needed to go and gad off to Africa for a week or two. And the timing of the availability of the rooms in the housing co-op couldn’t have been worse. Over the first three months of next year I have to arrange to get my father’s apartment cleaned, painted, papered, carpeted, emptied and put on the market, so as to cover his nursing home costs. The last thing I would want to do would be to return from that challenge and go straight into arranging moving flat in the Netherlands (let alone face all the historic emotional challenges that living in this co-op would bring up - with or without my ex being a resident there). My life would become a constant suitcase. Sometimes it seems the things we think we want aren’t actually the best for us. Equally it’s difficult to accept that the timing (or even the idea) may be wrong or misplaced.

This raised the deeper question of whether it is better to try to set my own goals, which can give me a sense of direction, but are often based on a historical or intellectual understanding of what I want, or to work with what I have and make the best of it, which seems to smack of fatalism. The things that I think that I want seem far away at the moment, but there is certainly no shortage of excitement or challenges in my life: just not the ones that I would choose. I now divide my time living between two countries, with very different cultures, opportunities and drawbacks. After six years living away from Britain, I am now spending 30-40% of my time in England and am coming to see it in a very different way. And the country treats me in a very different way. I bring new skills and competences that I have learned in the NL to the table and they seem to be opening new doors to me. On each visit to the UK I seem to receive a new invitation to nose around the corridors of power, albeit as a tentative guest: receptions at Westminster Palace, consultations with the government dept for development, etc. It’s weird, trying to balance my comfortable (but, it has to be said, somewhat boring) lifestyle in the NL with an altogether more exciting (but far more stressful one) one in the UK.
At the same time my business has shifted from one in which I sit behind a PC, correcting texts, to one in which I am again working as a researcher and also operating as a broker, negotiator and quality controller. These are not changes I was looking for, and are difficult to integrate into my schedule, especially simultaneously. But they seem like important challenges to ride and overcome. This week I have meetings in London, Oxford, Rugby and Bath. That’s a full week’s work (and some). In these dark and cold days it seems like a lot to take on- but longer, warmer and happier days will surely come. At the moment I am learning how to accommodate and embrace change and play it for what is worth, while not losing track of my longer-term goals. I am grateful for the reliable support networks that I do have, that make this all possible.
Nam Myoho Renge Kyo.