Now that I've returned to translating my mother's war stories, my pious grandmother, a former officer in the Salvation Army, has resumed her bible lessons from beyond the grave, laid down in her letters to my mother, such as this one dispatched from Amsterdam on 23 June 1944: Darling child – I'm taking a quick break to write this down, in the hope that this letter will reach you before Sunday. When it comes to travel plans nowadays, it seems wise to ensure you have prepared your last will and testament...

In the summer of 1942, a Jewish haberdasher from the Dutch town of Zwolle sought refuge in the Trophy Room of Zwaluwenburg Manor, which was then a psychiatric institution for women and girls. Michel Leo (Max) Hes meticulously recorded the mounting tension in his journal. |🧵 Things culminated on 20 November 1942, when several girls ran off into the woods during an evening walk, ending up at the German army camp, where they not only told an officer they were being abused, but also that there were Jewish people hiding at the institution.

Winter only officially starts today in the Netherlands and we would like to thank the people of South Africa for looking after it for the first two-thirds of December. The South African government has announced plans to make the country a global leader in poor weather storage for colder countries. “We have already signed an MoU with Finland, which will see most of their March weather taking place in the greater Bloemfontein area.”

Cees the Stone Age Man, who is considered to be the first North Hollander, lived in 2500 BC and mainly subsisted on a diet of deep-fried take-aways. In this reconstruction, he is shown checking the menu in a snackbar.

It is a great tragedy that movies like #SixMinutesToMidnight still get made, mainly because there are many more worthwhile, important and fascinating stories to be told about WWII, set in the dark forests and deep valleys of a terrible world far from The Little Island Kingdom. Thirteen hours later and I’m still seething at the way this cardboard-cut-out, shitely-scripted rush job not only jeopardised my love for Eddie Izzard and Judi Dench, but also took a potentially powerful story and reduced it to a panto version of Murder at Hollycock Manor.

In May 1943, a 20-year-old Jewish woman was arrested in Amsterdam and transported more than 1000 kilometres by train to be murdered, because the man who had given her refuge was betrayed to the Nazis by his vindictive ex-wife. The man survived Sachsenhausen and Neuengamme, but... ...died at the age of 45 in 1955. The vindictive ex remarried after the war and lived happily (presumably) ever after until the summer of 1981, when she passed away at the venerable age of 73.

If nothing else, writing non-fiction will teach you there is no such thing as karma.

Dutch people having a meltdown over snow that isn’t falling as forecast is probably the Dutchest thing I have ever seen. And I have seen a great many Dutch things in my days in this here polder.

With the US presidential election on the way, I decided to read up on the rules of democratic engagement, using the instruction manual for the AR-15 assault rifle. The results were as follows:

SEMI-AUTOMATIC DEMOCRAZY™
10 USER & SAFETY PRECAUTIONS

#Election2020 1. SEMI-AUTOMATIC DEMOCRAZY™ has been tooled to perfection, fully tested and inspected with care, but please ensure that the sights are set correctly, so that you do not hit random targets.

Just got back from one of the weirdest walks ever! As I was passing through the strip of woodland that runs alongside the river, I heard someone groaning. So I thought: probably just a couple of guys using the last breath of summer for some outdoor, lunchtime sex. When you've lived in Amsterdam for 30 years, you see some weird shit, including elderly ex-hippy neighbours having sex on the balcony, with Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" playing full-bawl and their mom shouting from the balcony above, that everyone can hear them.

When I left home at the age of seventeen in 1983, my mother gave me this little album. Being a wise-ass of monumental proportions I buried it at the bottom of my suitcase, where I recently retrieved it for the book I’m writing. Would you like to know what it contains? My mother’s full name was Theodora Herbertine — Thea for short. She had experienced a great deal in her life. Enough to fill several books. She was not shy about sharing her wisdom.

Dutch heat is special in that it draws groundwater to the surface and forces it with great pressure into the bodies of the nation's inhabitants, who wander around like sweating zombies in search of waterways, ponds and pools where they can release the fluid into the environment. The Netherlands is basically a delta marsh with houses and roads floating on it, some of Europe’s biggest rivers pass through the country and it rains approximately 300 days a year, but after three sunny days people start whispering the word “droogte” as if it’s the Sahara.

THREE HESITANT GENERATIONS – a 15-tweet thread

“Things are easier to judge from the helicopter,” I tweeted to a friend yesterday, when she expressed concern about the #BlackLivesMatter demo on the Dam, to which I’d been invited by my youngest daughter. She’s 19, but has been doing her own thing in Amsterdam for a while. I see her less often than I’d like, but when we do meet we talk about music, ambition, love, relationships, politics and responsibility, because when I was her age, I had to make some life-changing decisions.

Every writer that ever lived watching the world panic about their preferred state of existence. #socialdistancing. #WritersGuideToSocialDistancing
1) Don't eat your snacks straight from the packet. Put them in a little bowl. Keep refilling the bowl until the packet is empty. Have some dignity!
2) Celebrate your domestic achievements with short naps.
3) Try not to touch yourself constantly.

Because I live in a neighbourhood that was once home to a large Jewish community, I thought I might arrest your attention daily for those suffering in Yemen, Syria and elsewhere, with a visit to one of the little copper memorials that mark the homes of murdered Jewish neighbours. Georg Hornstein (8 Dec. 1900) lived just around the corner from me, not more than a hundred paces from my front door. He was arrested on 6 March 1942 and murdered in Buchenwald on 3 Sept. 1942. The life story of this German-Jewish resistance fighter is astonishing.

If you've always dreamed of being crushed to death wearing an inflatable crown and oversized sunglasses, please feel free to join the rest of the world in Amsterdam this Saturday. At dawn on King's Day, 27 April, police run house-to-house checks to ensure that everyone is outdoors, wearing at least one orange novelty item (underwear doesn't count) and carrying at least one six-pack. Anyone caught not smiling is jailed and has to help clean up on 28 April.

April 1945 | Almost liberated Netherlands | My mother writes...

We were living in limbo. Even the wandering loners had disappeared. It was a strange feeling, waiting almost breathlessly for the next phase. Nobody could predict exactly when and how it would present itself. It’s strange, but I don’t recall the exact date. It was before the 10th of May and it was a Monday, because I was doing the laundry. The weather was pleasant, because I was outside at the back of the house, with the tub.

My colleagues Maaike and Truus had the day off.

Here’s a thread on swimming safety for beach lovers like @sindivanzyl and other holidaymakers heading to the coast. I’m sure my surfing and lifesaving followers will add further advice.

1. Always try to stay calm and conserve energy by floating on the surface. 2. If you are caught in a current that is taking you away from the beach, NEVER try to swim against it. You will lose. A current is usually a narrow band of water. Try to steer yourself out of it.

The great horror of this age is that we know so much, but are still as incapable as ever. How do we stop this madness? What purpose does it serve?

https://twitter.com/jamesdenselow/status/1058727207978369024

Because I don’t have any better ideas on how to stop this horror, I’d like to retain your attention with an account of another famine, which took place just 75 years ago in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities during the Hunger Winter of 1944-’45.

Amsterdam kitchens are tiny, partly because most Dutch food is made on the floor, using an axe, a cudgel and a spade, which is used to scoop the meal into the pan. The work surfaces are just big enough for two drinks, a bowl of peanuts and the New Testament.

https://x.com/sindivanzyl/status/976411124060053504

Even outside their tiny kitchens, the Dutch are very fond of using tiny cooking utensils. Possibly because it makes them feel like giants, sitting down to a feast. This custom is — wholly inaptly, because the taste is foul — referred to as "gourmetten".

Dutch people always sit in a circle at birthday parties. The circle keeps getting bigger, until you can only speak to the person on either side of you. No one knows why. It is one of life's great mysteries. #FolkloreThursday When you arrive, you have to go around the circle shaking hands and congratulating EVERYONE (not just the host), possibly because you are never sure which people may have played vital role in the host's survival to see this joyous day.