Travel Reference
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innocuous pedestrian street called Heiligeweg almost every store front was completely hidden behind a set
of iron blinds - even the Aer Lingus office. What on earth is anyone going to steal from an Aer Lingus office
- the little model aeroplane in the window?
I found my way to the canals - the Singel, Herengracht, Keizersgracht and Prinsengracht - and things
were immediately better. I roamed along them in a happily random way, shuffling through leaves and litter,
cocooned by the tall narrow houses and old trees. Along its canals Amsterdam is an immensely beautiful
city, especially on a Sunday morning when there is almost no one about. A man sat in a patch of sun on his
stoop with a cup of coffee and a newspaper, another was returning from somewhere with a bottle of wine, a
young couple passed entwined in a post-coital glow, and the occasional unhurried cyclist crossed from one
side street to another somewhere up ahead, like extras employed to lend colour to the scene, but in two
hours of wandering around I saw not another soul but them.
Again and again, I found myself leaning on a railing on a small humpbacked bridge just gazing into the
shimmering green water, lost in a simple-minded reverie until a tour boat would chunter by, full of tourists
with cameras, slicing through the mirrored street scene below me to break the spell. In its wake there would
always be a little festival of bestirred litter - a Fairy Liquid bottle, some cigarette packets, assorted cartons
from McDonald's and Burger King - and I would be reminded that Amsterdam is also a dirty city. It's full of
dog shit and litter and graffiti. The graffiti is everywhere - on phone boxes, on park benches, on the walls of
almost every building, even on the marbled vaults of the passageway that runs like a tunnel beneath the
Rijksmuseum. I have never seen so much graffiti. And it's not even good graffiti. It's just random squiggles,
sprayed by people with brains the size of a Cheerio. The Dutch seem to have a problem with mindless
crime. You may never get mugged in Amsterdam, but I'm told you can't park a car on the streets anywhere
in the centre of the city in the evening without a strong probability of someone scoring the paintwork from
end to end with a screwdriver.
When I was twenty I liked Amsterdam - indeed admired it passionately - for its openness, its
tolerance, its relaxed attitude to dope and sex and all the other sins that one can't get enough of at twenty.
But I found it oddly wearisome now. The people of Amsterdam were rather stuck with their tradition of
tolerance, like people who take up a political stance and then have to defend it no matter how untenable it
gets. Because they have been congratulating themselves on their intelligent tolerance for all these centuries,
it is now impossible for them not to be nobly accommodating to graffiti and burned-out hippies and dog shit
and litter. Of course, I may be completely misreading the situation. They may like dog shit and litter. I sure
hope so, because they've certainly got a lot of it.
Here and there I would pass a house braced with timbers, awaiting urgent repairs. Amsterdam was
built on a swamp, and just keeping the canalside houses from sinking into it is an unending task. My
Times
colleague's brother bought a house on one of the lesser canals and discovered after moving in that the
pilings on which it had been built three hundred years before were rotting away and the house was sinking
into the underlying ooze at a rate that would make most of it basement within a short while. Putting new
pilings under several tons of existing structure is not the easiest job in the world and it cost him almost twice
as much to have the house shored up as it did to buy it in the first place. This was almost twenty years ago,
and he still wears socks with holes in them because of the debt.
I suppose the same experience has been repeated in countless buildings all over the city, so you have
to admire the good people of Amsterdam for keeping the houses standing, and even more for having the
sense to keep the canal streets residential. In Britain the ground floors would long ago have been filled with
kebab houses and building-society offices and Sketchley dry cleaners, all with big picture windows, as if
anybody in the world cares to see what's going on inside a dry cleaner's or a building society.
I've never understood this. The first thing a building society does when it acquires a Victorian building
in Britain is gut the ground floor and put in a lot of plate glass. Why? As you may have noticed, building
societies have
nothing
to put in their windows. So they make a fan-shaped arrangement of brochures
informing you that you can borrow money there - 'Christ, thanks, I thought you sold sausages' - and insert
some dreadful watercolours by the manager's wife. So I am full of admiration for the Dutch for preserving
their finest streets and insisting that people live on them.
The one problem is that it makes the occasional catastrophe all the more unbearable, as I discovered
