snippets of amsterdam
Dispatches from my iPhone notes app, photos shot on Bat Country tungsten film.
There’s a misty drizzle in the air, cold snap softened to the mild sunless place I’m used to. I’m going somewhere I’ve been told about over years of visits to Amsterdam but have never got round to, a a city underexplored in favour of the usual desire paths of preferred local café, favourite photography gallery, best place to get apple cake.
Our Lord in the Attic is a preserved 17th century Catholic church hidden in the top floors of a canal house on the edge of what is now Amsterdam’s red light district. Built to avoid the eyes of a disapproving Protestant City Council, and once a cornerstone of an extensive secret network now lost to religious tolerance. The interior is a time capsule, all narrow stairways leading to splashes of gold, but I’m most taken by looking outwards from within. Through fogged windows the dome and spires of the Oudekerk poke above mist that has swallowed all buildings behind it. Office workers scuttle through the building opposite blurred by rain, and the steps into a stone-flagged kitchen wind a few feet through stone and glass from the strip lights of a coffee shop. In the priest’s dressing room you see straight through to the Thai restaurant next door.
When my cousin and uncle joke in Dutch I can often make sense of it. For most of my decades of visiting them I have been able to parse the menus and the subtitled news. I think about what space in my head those languages that I can navigate occupy, the smatterings of others, and what things might be living in that space otherwise. What other skills, facts, thoughts might take their place. In my twenties I rarely used these languages that I’d spent often dull hours in school and often lonely months abroad to learn, and thought of that headspace as waste. But, as with many opinions I firmly held then, I was wrong; if never left the UK ever again it would still be great wealth. I think the language puzzle pieces don’t fill but instead stretch my brain, labyrinthine storage space, the more stuffed in the bigger it becomes like some neural Mary Poppins bag, a Tardis of layers and layers of different words for the same object, the same feeling, but none of which directly overlay. If they weren’t crowding my head then perhaps many fewer things would be in there too, my capacity to absorb diminished, my ability to learn turned down.
For my 30th my aunt gifted me dinner on a lighthouse island, and we all come to collect the debt two years on. We eat pickles, cheese and sausage on a boat moving through grey waters, dark industrial Amsterdam rising up on either side. When we dock the light is fading and a pink sunset bleeds over an artificially lit skyline, the lighthouse blinking overhead. We disembark to become shadows armed with lanterns, a glowing pathway snaking down the pier towards the restaurant on the other side of the island. The silhouette of a little girl waves from the second floor of a lone house and I wonder whether she’s a permanent resident, whether looking out on our uplit faces is a nightly ritual for her.
We eat in domed bunkers strung with shadows, lit by candles and firelight. We’re told about a stone barricade that runs underwater around the edge of the island, a relic from defences in the war, and that private boats often run aground in the summer. Is this true, or is it patter from a cautious owner keen to avoid problems? This island feels a world away from Amsterdam, the sort of sanctuary where the very rich might flee when things collapse on the mainland - though perhaps it will be underwater by then, millionaires all crowding up onto the top of the lighthouse.
On our return to the city a dampness falls upon the skin, individual raindrops indistinguishable in a mist of wet. My cousin points to a beam of light glowing weakly through low-hanging grey above us, apparently celebrating a city founding anniversary of indeterminate number of centuries. It’s shrouded in cloud, only really visible to those who already know it’s there, already know what it means. Like most of any city, really.
The next day it is raining properly and I tramp a familiar desire path towards a pub where I know there’s a log burner and good bitterballen. All the tables around the stove are taken but the bar is empty. I spread myself across the chairs where it meets the wall and soak into the luxury of being alone in a capital city with money and time to spend on bar snacks and my book, a delicious privilege that has somehow felt fleeting at every period of my life while anticipating the next one. Two women approach me and ask if the seats directly next to me are free because they love to sit in the corner, so I move my bag and coat. The three of us sit tightly packed together while the rest of the bar remains empty. A feeling begins to consume me, one I experience regularly outside of the UK; I am feeling socially awkward, and the awareness that my companions are not feeling this only makes me feel it more. There is no direct translation in Dutch for feeling awkward, nor in many European languages.
A table by the fire becomes free and as I move my collection of layers and book and camera and bitterballen they supportively smile and acknowledge that it is indeed a better seat than theirs, though they have no intention of moving.