Take me to a place

The longer I live in this urban settlement behind the sandy beaches of the North Sea, the more beautiful places I discover. One of my favourite squares is Sweelinckplein in the borough of Duinoord. Between the Neo-Renaissance houses lies a quaint urban park that is home to both the composer Jan Pieterszoons Sweelinck and a fairytale girl. It’s a little haven of quiet, where the fragrant lavender invites you to laugh and dance under the stars. But nothing quite prepares you for the overwhelming splendour of the spring blossom that, for only a moment, colours your entire world.

How sweet it is

What I love most about the beach is that not one day is the same. You think you know what your walk will bring, the breaking waves rushing in, the salted wind playing with your hair, the gulls flying high above you, but then you arrive and all your expectations are blown away, and you can no longer hear the questions and doubts that pierce your existence. Everything you thought you knew… about life, about love… disappears. And it is just you and the universe. And you feel that every day is a new beginning.

I always knew I was a hobbit

Or suspected it, at least. Ever since reading the first chapter of The Hobbit, in which Baggins is confronted with an unexpected party (making for the most awkward Wednesday he ever remembered), which is one of the funniest things I have ever read – mostly because it is exactly how I would react: head in hands, wondering what had happened and what was going to happen and wanting to hide behind the beer-barrels in the cellar and not come out again until they had all gone away… But it wasn’t until I went into the woods on a particularly gloomy day and wandered off by myself that I discovered that I have more in common with Baggins than I thought…

Kind of blue

It’s one of those cold misty afternoons, bare willow branches brushing softly against the grey cloudless sky. I am listening to One Sided Love Affair by Trespassers W serenading the city of Berlin: how she cries and how she laughs. It’s the kind of blue, undisturbed time that Cor Gout writes about in Korenblauw. As a sensitive soul, I love his beautifully composed, old-style stories, which take me beyond the crudeness of the world. Where a sympathetic weasel urges you to uncover the rites of your past as the hedgehog gingerly replies, while he puts up his quills, that some things are to be left unsaid (“Albino Spreeuw”). Where empty hours fill the space of your being with creativity, if you are patient enough to wait (“De Lege Tijd”). Where something can be both the case and not the case without leaving you unsettled (“Ja en Nee”). Where what you write isn’t just made up, where even fiction is about truth (“Schrijverschap”). Where little mice dance nose to nose on your raspberry-red Phoni recordplayer (Vian 1920-1959; illustrated by Hélène Penninga). I guess I’d better join them now!

Digging up paradise

Every once in a while you read a book that speaks to your heart. For me, Sarah Salway’s books always do. Her latest, Digging Up Paradise: Potatoes, People and Poetry in the Garden of England, is another gem. Salway takes us along on her visits to twenty-six public gardens in Kent. Together we find seashells, wildflowers, vegetable patches, magical trees, eccentric hedges, ancestral woods, the loveliest castle in the world… all the while, feeling the grass under our feet as we listen to ‘strawberry-shaped words’, peculiar tales and enchanted histories. Her poem “Night Grass” (about Doddington Place) is so beautiful, I want to hang it on my wall as a gatha that I can come back to again and again. And then there’s her “Letter to a Stranger”, which whispers to me like the wind: ‘not every day needs a destination, or to make sense’.