Yes indeed!!!.........
....the famous Red indian stiff upper lip has been the resting place over the last few days for a variety of naturally grown herbal remedies. Any German airman deciding to chance his arm over Englands green and pleasant land over the last three or four days, would have found the me in a very accomodating frame of mind, and had he made the mistake of drifting across my gun sights, may well have found me with my canopy pushed back with the radio turned off admiring the passing clouds.
So....AMSTERDAM.......yes, a very enjoyable few days and thank you all for being so concerned about my well being during my short vacation! I had a good time and found the place well worth a visit.
One thing that the trip reminded me about was how much I hate air travel. Constant showing of ID, cueing, waiting, mad dashes to get on the plane, cooped up like a battery hen for over an hour in a seat clearly designed as an instrument torture for any one over four feet tall, being forced to have close sweaty skin contact with two complete strangers, constant worry about your personal belongings and documents, paranoid delusions about hijackers and pick pockets, terrifiying thoughts about all the drunken tossers I know who work at Rolls Royce who I have now been forced to trust with my life!
So.....Amsterdam........very odd place really, if you build a city on a waterlogged swamp I suppose you have to expect that it will start to fall down, which a lot of it seems to be trying to do, despite desparate attempts by the fanatically optimistic Dutch to shore the whole place up.
I dont recall seeing a single Building that was totally plumb and square, or maybe it was my heavy intake of herbal remedies that was causing these optical distortions!
AMSTERDAM AND CYCLISTS..........these twats on bikes really pissed me off for the whole duration, I would love to see these people try to cycle thro my home town in the same arrogant agressive manner, with no regard for either their own safety or anyone elses, they would soon find themselves in a heap on the pavement with a black eye from someones elbow.......probably mine.
The most stupid thing I saw, kind of summed up the Dutch attitude to cycling and a lack of basic common sense regarding road use. I saw a young woman on a bicycle with one child perched precariously behind her, and another child standing on the cross bar in front of her totally obscuring her view of the road, none of them were wearing any kind of head protection or any other safety gear. She also had a dog on a lead tied to the handel bars running for its life next to the bicycle, and if thats not enough she was also using a mobile phone as she hurtled along narrow pedestrianised streets, ringing the bicycle bell at anyone daring to cross her path.
Most other cyclists behave in a similar manner.
In contrast, I was deeply touched by the open and hospitable manner of the Dutch people, especially Dutch house wives. They are all very house proud and spend a lot of time cleaning their windows and have no shame when it comes to letting you see their homes from the street with big wide full length windows. While their husbands are out working hard to stop the city from falling round their ears they can be sure that their women folk are at home all day and indeed most of the night desparately trying to entice totall strangers in to their homes just to prove how well kept they are. I was there during something of a heatwave which would have been enough to make most of us give up house work and take time off to relax in a nearby rapidly collapsing bar or resaurant, but Dutch women are made of sterner stuff my friends! Completely unconcerned about their own loss of dignity or any personal embarrassement, they had simply stripped off down to their underwear and carried on regardless!
One lovely woman was so proud of her little home that she opened the glass front door and offered me 40 euros just to come in a look round for half an hour, I politely declined her offer and said I would be happy to do it for free, she said something that sounded like "fuck off pencil dick" but unfortunately I dont speak Dutch.
(Warning, some American readers may need to go in to "settings" on the tool bar and select "irony scanner" then select the "maximum" setting in order to make sense of the last two paragraphs)
