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Web Archive: Ha! 1998
Cartoon by Ian Parratt
A WEEKEND IN AMSTERDAM
by Maureen Byrne
THE FIRST THING you notice when you arrive in Amsterdam is the lack of kiddies running around. There are several reasons for this. The first is the very real hazard of kamikaze bicycle fiends that come flying at you from every direction. I’m a grown uyp (well, sort of) and I had trouble leaping out of the way of several of these pedal-pushers from hell, nearly ending up in an embarrassing, not to mention, painful, clutter of spokes and handlebars. Clacton wide boys in souped-up Xr3is have got nothing on the cloggies!
Another reason I suspect that dear innocent wee ones are not seen on the streets is that it’s very easy to wander into an area of (ahem) disrepute. It puts a whole new perspective on the phrase ‘going shopping’, when you realise that those human-looking dummies in the shop windows are real live women waggling their wobbly bits and displaying their ample wares to all and sundry. Sundry was very shocked, I can tell you.
You can also get postcards of said wobbly bits in frightening close up. Intrigued, I picked one up from the corner shop and was trying to figure out what on earth it was, examining it from all angles (much to the delight of my husband) before shrieking and dropping it in the mud. Body piercing is a very advanced art in Amsterdam and they seem to like having rings inserted everywhere but their ears. Meanwhile, my highly inquisitive five-year-old was taking each postcard off the rack in turn, giggling and sying by turns “what’s that, mummy,” or “that’s a picture of a lady’s boobies” very loudly indeed. Not quite the way anatomy is taught at his primary school, I fear.
I learned my lesson. Every time we visited a shop after that, I cased the joint for naughty bits (living or otherwise). They have lots of gadgets that children are fascinated with too, and liberated though I am, I didn’t really want to explain what a giant clockwork willy could be used for.
Talking of joints, that is the other attraction that obviously pulls a very adult crowd to the Dutch capital. After wandering into a few ‘coffee shops’, feeling a bit peckish and in need of a cuppa, naively asking for the menu and being engulfed in a cloud of unctuous fumes, I realised that coffee was not the only thing on the menu. In fact, when I asked for the menu, I thought they’d provided me with a list of rather exotic sandwich ideas: Northern Lights, Skunk (didn’t like the sound of that one much), and Nepalese didn’t sound like varieties of Dutch cheese I’d ever heard of. I’ll just have a coffee, I managed to splutter as the nice man behind the counter explained that they were types of cannabis. Nervously looking around for the fuzz and expecting a dramatic ‘bust’ at any moment, I was assured that in Holland they take a much more lenient view of this sort of thing. I made my excuses and left as the journos on the News of the World are wont to say.
Still, we managed to find a bit of culture amongst the sleaze. the paintings of the one-eared wonder were well worth seeing. Pity that they were worth about a millionth of a guilder while the poor wretch was alive and they’re sold for untold millions now he’s pegged it. Ah well, maybe these scribbles will be worth a few bob when I’m pushing up daisies. I doubt it, but I can dream, especially when enveloped in the smoke of a dozen or so spliffs in a Dutch coffee shop! Ha!
This was a superb cartoon strip spoof on the Good Life produced for our short-lived website in 1998, by cartoonist Ian Parratt.
You can go back to webarchive.org to explore but a lot of the links will not work. Ha!
