The umbilical cord

-


begijnhof amsterdam

For years I have been coming back to Amsterdam as if coming back home. I have been homesick for the anarchy and the messiness of the city, the sights that have been so familiar to me in all seasons and at all times of the day and night. She was asking me to return. To return to the bicycles here there and everywhere, not paying heed to other road users. To return to the canals, lined with trees in leaf, the softest cover possible. To return to the sounds of the trams, the sounds of the city, my cradle of coming of age.

But this last visit, I found something was broken. I didn't recognise the city I loved. It is tacky and incredibly filthy, she sells herself to tourists, selling stroopwafels, cheap tat, sex and the promise of culture which is never fulfilled. Probably in the neighbourhoods away from the centre you can glimpse a bit of what she used to be - and here, the Begijnhof, where in the Church Jim and I got married.

I cried. For the loss of my city- the umbilical cord is cut.

Comments

Post a Comment

Thank you! Be your nose a pointer for your brain! (OED)

Popular posts from this blog

‘The whelk ye freely confessed’: The Witch Trials in Crook of Devon

-
Image
One day in the early spring, Isabel Rutherford got a knock on her door. We don’t know whether she had a husband, friends or children. We certainly know that she had enemies. Isabel was accused of witchcraft and confessed. On the 3rd of April she was tried and convicted for witchcraft. On 5 April, she was taken to Lamblaires, a field close to the Crook Mill. She was strangled and her body was burned at the stake. Were her friends and family there to say goodbye? Were her accusers there? We don’t know. Two other convicted witches were executed alongside her and more were to follow. The year is 1662; the place is Crook of Devon, a rural village in Kinross-shire in Scotland. 350 years ago, people believed in the existence of witches. This belief was so entrenched that in Scotland alone, thousands of people were accused of witchcraft and in many cases convicted and executed. Around 3,000 people were tried, although gaps in the records make an accurate count impossible. There could hav...
Read more

Domestic Goddess, of sorts

-
Image
With reassuring regularity my nearly-30-year-old son phones me with a domestic query. He, in the age of googling anything and everything, still prefers me as the prime domestic search engine. These questions vary from gardens to stain-removal, from cooking to mending. He is also wont to dropping his mending in my lap from time to time. ‘Can you fix this, mum?’  Part of me is glad that he asks me and not his girlfriend. It is a mother-thing, not a woman-thing. Part of me is glad that I am still relevant in his life. The first of these calls was when he was just living in the student halls. ‘Mam, how do you defrost meat balls?’  He had a little, handwritten cookbook with him, with tried and tested recipes written down in his own hand. Meatballs, spaghetti cannelloni (for years pronounced by him as candeloni) and brownies.  Student fare: things we had practised. However, we never practised defrosting. Another goo...
Read more

The Little Hill of Women

-
Image
  I wasn’t prepared for the sheer beauty of Omey Island.   The extraordinary quality of light, the shifting patterns of currents in the water and the clouds in the sky, the poles marking the causeway.   The calm sea was almost imperceptibly advancing, swallowing up the ripples in the sand, inch by inch. Before parking in the small car park at the slipway, I’d gone into Sweeney’s, the pub cum village shop.   When I asked about Patti, the shopkeeper told me that she had been buried three months ago.   I had known I would be too late. ‘She never married,’ the woman said.   ‘Too busy painting.’   She pointed at some postcards.   I bought water and a sandwich and set off.   The causeway would be open for another two hours.   It was brightening up, the wind blowing holes in the clouds.   A funeral procession was gathering to walk over to the graveyard.   Here, even funerals here were subject to the tide. Crossing the causeway t...
Read more