I love the sea. How it lights up at four when the sun leans down. And lures man, woman, child. Games and laughter. The tears it absorbs as you walk along its coast. Stroked away by a gentle breeze. Blown away, sometimes, on a particularly bad day. The shells. The little girl who hopes to […]
moreRemember Summer as it used to be?A wide-open field. Sticky and tickly, the sting of a bee.And then there’s Summer as it is now.Limited somehow.
moreThe evening was heavy with expectation. The whole street, the city, the country, was wanting to celebrate. To dance, drink, rejoice, embrace, love. Almost desperately. We joined our neighbours, bonded with them in the common code of beer and of kids who were staying up late as we held on to the screen. I walked […]
moreMy sister was never attached to things. Paintings, trinkets, furniture. She’d share her clothes with all her friends. I was the opposite. I’d freak out if anyone so much as borrowed a pencil. It’s still like that today. Not literally, but figuratively. I feel attached to a necklace my grandmother left me. She would never. […]
moreHe is on facebook, and he comes recommended as a friend. But he is dead. He is on Linkedin too. His photo smiles at me. He is tanned and he is wearing a bow tie. Radiant. Alive. Where it says likes & interests he has filled in: Charlie Chaplin. He has friends and connections and […]
moreLocation: the only remaining bar in Amsterdam that allows smoking.Occasion: monthly Friday drinks for writers.Flashback to four months ago: I met a colleague writer. His debut novel had sold 100.000 copies. He was now fighting depression. His second novel had been dismissed by reviewers and sold only a fraction. He was fighting anxieties and seeing […]
moreRemember when you were madly in love with someone? And then you thought “all right, if I just tell him then I’ll have it off my chest and it will disappear.” But it wasn’t true. It only got worse. Here’s the rule: putting feelings out in the open do not diminish them. They flare up […]
moreEvery morning, I bike through the park. I drop my son off at school and on the way back they’re there: the laughs. They rise up from beneath two trees next to a pond. Whoops of laughter in different tones, almost like a symphony.On nearing the trees, the people who produce the laughs become visible. […]
moreThe Stabat Mater, about a mother who loses her son. Then comes the composer who has lost three children. And just listen to the intensity of this final verse. At 3.06 starts the Amen. It is both suffering and release. It is painful to listen to, yet comforting. It is creation at its most frantic, […]
moreA friend flew in from the Caribbean. It was a sad trip for her, she came to see her best-friend who has a fatal brain tumor. She stayed in a hotel close to my home and so I got to see her often. It had been years since we managed to connect the way we […]
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