Tchoo Late and Tchoo Schmelly!


I think I can say my Anti-Amsterdam phase is over now. I’m just anti-scuzzers. And who could have a problem with that? We’ve just had a night-off in Amsterdam--the first quiet time I’ve had since the start of the tour. It’s taken nearly 12 hours of mooching around and doing nothing special to start to feel anything like normal again. Tonight I ate falafels and talked about nothing much with a friend. It felt so normal a small grateful tear rolled down my cheek at the end of the night. Or maybe that was because the falafels achieved a legendary spiciness. Either way, it was pure, unadulterated gratitude.



I wandered around the city a little at night. I was hoping for a little more by way of pagan lights but the lights here were very understated. Aside from the obvious red ones, that is. Understated but apt, I thought. See for yourself. When your City looks as cool as Amsterdam what do you care for Christmas lights?



The area was busy, not just with men in raincoats or gangs of men out drinking (although it was mostly this), but with couples and tourists safely enjoying the edginess. Walking past all the prostitute’s windows my second thought was that it’s got to be a hard, hard job. The men (not me of course, I'm different to every other man on the planet) really do view them as chattel. The whole red light area is steeped in a kind of workaday seediness – there are the dealers, the women, the storekeepers and the skeevy pimps all making a living by selling an assortment of fantasies. Then there are the punters (many of whom are so tightly coiled they almost flinch if you look at them) all slightly breathless with anticipation and eager to believe even the most exhausted hooker’s smile or the shadiest dealer’s spiel about his drug’s potency.



North African dealers hang around on the middle of the bridges hissing the names of the drugs they can sell to you. Along one street three people spoke to me, and I heard in order (I’ve tried to get the Dutch accent down phonetically, I really like the accent here…):

“You chlike any cocaine?”
“Porno! Come in before it gets tchoo late and tchoo schmelly!”
“Psst! Charlie. Chou want shome?”

This seemed so absurd and open it made me laugh. Then I saw five English guys pushing their friend into a hooker’s doorway and cheering and it all seemed less absurd and more obscene. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a sordid fascination with all of this (I will go to my grave believing you can gauge a nations psyche by looking at its advertising and its pornography) but I felt like I was slumming it in the end, going to look at the poor people scratching a living by ruining themselves before going back to my schmancy hotel to blog about how delightfully vulgar it all is. Voyuer would be a generous description, I think.



I was thinking it might be a chuckle to go for a smoke in a coffee shop (and it’s been a long, long time since I did that) but that would only be good in the right company and the only person I want to do that with isn’t here. Probably a good thing too. Or not. Seeing all that broken humanity somehow makes me want to steep myself in feelings altogether more aspirational and to foster those sensibilities that come from tenderness and not self-loathing. After wasting so much time I’ve a desire to make more of life instead of less. Watching people attend their own wakes is ultimately depressing; it’s always easier to say no to life. Which is ironic, isn't it?