Found Objects

So how would you feel if for years you’d been in the habit of doing something you thought was a good thing, absolutely saw the sense of, took pains to do right, taught your children to do, put up with discomfort in order to do…

… and then suddenly you’re told that you don’t have to do it any more, and not only that (so you could at least feel virtuous for keeping it up regardless) but it’s made impossible?

No, I’m not talking about the outdated practice of covering one’s head in church. I’m talking about the outdated practice of separating household waste into organic and miscellaneous. Which was the spiffy new thing, let’s see, a few decades ago.

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I’m writing this to combat other frustration with bureaucracy that I don’t want to write about yet. Disclaimer: all of these cases are based on things that happened to people I know, but the facts have been melted down and recast. If you think you recognise yourself or your own, please don’t mail me saying “but it didn’t happen exactly like that!” because, well, that’s the point.

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Is it hopelessly naive of me to think of the square root of x as “the number that x is the square of” and that, consequently, 2(sqrt 3) * (sqrt 3) is 2*3, that is, 6? Why does my daughters’ math book want them to calculate it as 2(sqrt 9) first? Granted, that also comes out 6, but why the extra step?

Also, don’t they teach them that the square of a+b (can’t do proper math notation) is (a squared) + 2ab + (b squared)? When I drew the square-with-rectangles that I was taught decades ago to visualise it, the girl who was struggling with the problem didn’t understand the visualisation any better than she understood the problem itself, and insisted that it was only (a squared) + (b squared).

Filia Prima says it’s the math book, and our friend who is tutoring her (because she got interested in how a math book can make mathematics so much more complicated) tends to agree.

There are lots of street magazines in the Netherlands, sold (and often produced) by homeless people, like The Big Issue in the United Kingdom and elsewhere: Z Magazine in Amsterdam, De Zelfkrant in Den Bosch, Haags Straatnieuws in The Hague, De Riepe (which is Groninger dialect for “The Sidewalk”) in the North, Straatjournaal in Haarlem (no website, but a big presence in the local news), Straatmagazine Leiden in Leiden, Straatmagazine in Rotterdam and Straatnieuws, the oldest street magazine of the Netherlands, in Utrecht, Amersfoort and Hilversum. In Arnhem, Nijmegen, Doetinchem and Apeldoorn there used to be Impuls, but it folded in July 2007 for lack of vendors; probably a good thing, because it means that fewer people are homeless.

Whenever I find myself in one of those towns I buy a copy. In Utrecht, if possible, from the same vendor every time, a friendly stick-thin man who stands at one of the exits of the station area. I don’t give money to beggars on principle, but if someone is making a real effort —whether playing music, drawing chalk sidewalk pictures or selling street magazines— I usually contribute.

Our town doesn’t have a street magazine, worse luck. Probably because nobody can set it up, or there are no starting funds, rather than for lack of people who could sell it, judging by the number of likely suspects I see in the streets. (This may be skewed by the fact that we live very close to the local homeless facility, but I think there are a few dozen at least.).

Instead, we have Het Daklozenwoord. It may look like a street magazine on first sight, but it doesn’t quite quack like one: it’s run by Eastern European gangs, it may be sold by people who are technically homeless, but as far as I (or at least my sources) can find out they don’t get to keep any of the proceeds. And the vendors I’ve met —a whole family of them, taking turns at the door of my usual supermarket— weren’t very friendly, but saying “Daaklozenkraant! Asseblief! Dankoewel!” in a whiny voice, ever more insistently, even to the same person who has said “no” three times in a row in the last five minutes. I wish those people would stick to making music; they do that too, and not at all badly.

And any guilt-induced impulse to give them the benefit of the doubt was quashed forever when I saw the only female member of that family —a girl of around twenty— carefully set her face to “pitiful” before taking up her pile of papers.

Ever seen a “please close the door” sign on a sliding door so you could only read the sign when the door was closed? This is the same thing, only with treacle.

Treacle comes in one-pound waxed cardboard cups. Under the lid there’s an inner cover, also of waxed cardboard, explaining how to hold the cup to prevent spilling treacle all over self and kitchen (“hold the cup like this, and not by the lid”). But you can only read it when you’ve already removed the lid, as seen in the bottom picture. Granted, the first time you remove the lid the inner cover is still on it, but if you hold it by the lid, and not as seen in the top picture, you’re bound to spill treacle on the floor.

It’s also got a grammatical oddity. “Deksel” can be grammatically epicene (de deksel) or neuter (het deksel); the legend along the edge says “Environment-friendly paper lid” in the epicene form, while the main text has “het deksel” in the neuter form.

But I do like the treacle jumping out of the cup in the how-not-to picture.

A tiny one-paragraph bit in our paper, but here’s a more elaborate article from the International Herald Tribune: Sweden is about to outlaw the teaching of religion outside religious-education lessons in private schools. In public schools there’s already no teaching of religion, I suppose.

It sounds like a refreshing change from the school my kids are in, where lots of things are taught in religious-education lessons, very few of them having much to do with religion. But that’s not the point: the point is, apparently, to protect students from fundamentalism. Christian fundamentalism, as the larger article makes clear and the tiny bit in the paper didn’t. Keeping people ignorant keeps them innocent? That’s never worked before. In fact, fundamentalism often springs from ignorance.

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Trying to find a train to Haarlem for tomorrow on the Dutch Railways planner, I noticed that they wanted to send me via Utrecht. Usually, that’s a detour —Deventer, Amsterdam and Haarlem lie more or less in a straight line east-west, with Utrecht well out of the way to the south— so I tried to go explicitly via Amsterdam. They sent me via Utrecht and Amsterdam. Lots of warnings about works on the line [*] but nothing between Deventer and Amsterdam, so I got curious.

[*] It was very heartening in Greece to see road works announced with “LITOURGIA”, making me realise that “liturgy” means “the work that has to be done to make everything run smoothly”, in a mundane context no less than in a spiritual one. Less heartening, though, to see “PROSFORA” in every other shop, meaning merely “special offer”.

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Ridiculously early by Orthodox standards (April 8; earliest it can be is April 4), and still quite early by Western standards. So the supermarket I still call my favourite, though that may change once they’ve finished refurbishing my usual instance of it with, among other abominations, a “cook-and-choose island” right where you come in, where you can buy what is basically a meal kit for two adults and two children; useless, not only because I prefer to make my own choices, but also because I have too many children to fit their marketing concept. And anyway, they’re teenagers, so they Grow. And Eat. Ah well.

… what was I saying? Oh yes, the supermarket has chocolate Easter eggs on the shelves. In January. One of the teenagers tells me that another shop already had some last week. Not that I object to chocolate Easter eggs; on the contrary, I’d probably buy and eat some now if it wasn’t for the fact that I, you know, celebrate Easter.

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Years ago, we discovered Bolletje Eindeloos cinnamon biscuits. Thin hard biscuits sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, nice enough to be more-ish, plain enough for fast days, handy to take to work or school because they come in three separate compartments of five biscuits each to a pack.

We all liked them a lot. I didn’t buy many, or often— I could get some whenever I liked, anyway.

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Pardon my ranting.

Geert Wilders, leader of the Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom) has published his party program. In it, he proposes to revoke Article 1 of the Dutch Constitution: [1]

All persons in the Netherlands shall be treated equally in equal circumstances. Discrimination on the grounds of religion, belief, political opinion, race or sex or on other grounds whatsoever shall not be permitted.

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The UPS van stopping in front of our house made me gleefully abandon my ironing this morning. More like the UPS lorry, really: it was on the huge side of substantial and, like all UPS vans, gothically black with gold lettering. I hope the neighbours were watching. It brought not one but two Dells, which Boudewijn has already blogged about extensively (also in other articles in that vicinity; just keep reading).

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And Whit Monday, of course, and Boxing Day.

Well, maybe not. They’re traditional, after all, and some people do want an extra day off to do furniture fun-shopping, and I especially don’t want to get mixed up in the debate about all Dutch national holidays being Christian holidays, “and can’t we accommodate other faiths, or abolish all feast days because nobody believes any more anyway?”

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Writing the post about circumcision made me think about issues of privacy. An attitude (almost wrote ‘meme’ but that means something else in the blog world these days, I think) that’s becoming more and more prevalent in modern society, at least modern Dutch society, is that you don’t need privacy if you have nothing to hide. And, conversely, that if you want privacy it’s a sure sign that you have something to hide.

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Translating and commenting on parts of an article in yesterday’s Trouw:

The Commission Against Female Genital Mutilation has presented Minister Hoogervorst of Public Health with a package of measures to ‘eradicate’ circumcision of girls.

Well, that sounds reasonable enough. It goes on to say that it happens about fifty times a year to girls living in the Netherlands, mostly in their home countries (in the Sahara area).

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“I can throw this in the paper recycling, right?” a kid asked when I was kneading bread dough, and when I saw what “this” was I almost said yes, but then I started thinking. Baking bread always does that to me. “No!” I said, “I’ll probably want to write about it.”

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