| Shooting Blanks (2) |
| What you see here is Amsterdam, believe it or not. The sign advises the reader that "All bicycles are removed". There's no mention of any ban, and yet the public meekly obey. I'm not sure that I want to live in such a disciplined city … |
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I can appreciate why they are removing all those bollards from the inner
city. It's to do with economic pressure, you see. Parking on the pavement
warrants a suitably hefty price tag if there's a tidy profit in it
somewhere. I am however counting on the imminent introduction of a municipal
decree authorising traffic wardens to put wheel clamps on motorcars that
have been stuck in gridlock for too long, or the inner city loop will never
even break even.
I don't even know why I am using the word "überhaupt"*, and for the third time in as many weeks, at that. The Dutch language simply has no other word which is capable to the same extent of communicating implicit disbelief. It's simply not in our volksgeist, if you'll excuse my German. What we are looking for as a nation is the opportunity to show the folks how it's done. Of course we also know better than them how it's done. And don't we just love running something into the ground! Disbelief has something to do with refusing to be involved. You only need to look at those chary Dutch faces to know there's an element of truth in this statement. However, a facial emotion hidden behind that distant analytical gaze (you bet there is). In other words, I resort to using the word "überhaupt" whenever I've lost my Dutch bearings. |
| * The German word "überhaupt" ("in any event") is arguably one of the most popular loan words in the Dutch language, as is that other stalwart, "sowieso", which roughly has the same meaning. |
| ***** |
| You don't need to be a photographer to imagine my not being able to remove the image of the duckling dangling in the heron's beak (WR 54) from my retina, and so I spent the next days cycling through the city with two cameras in my pannier, with the aim of catching a heron in some kind of act. I almost succeeded once, at that. I was watching intently how a mother duck and her fleet of ducklings were steadily approaching the heron, which I had been following to no avail for the better part of ten minutes, wondering conscientiously whether the duck family had any idea of the danger I was sure they were in, and as I was considering (alright, I'm not proud of it) that I was about to take the photograph of my dreams, the heron decided to scarper. I was given a full frontal view of its mighty wings, its pointy beak set at a most gratifying diagonal angle in the top right-hand corner … but when I pressed the button, my display advised me in red blinking symbols that my battery had run out. And quite rightly so, for could I really indict a heron for bird killing on the basis of nothing more than a picture of the threatening beat of its wing? |
| ***** |