No one had a drinking problem. You simply kept drinking at birthdays, and by the end of the evening you would conclude that the same drink “suited” one person better than another.
I am still one of those people who occasionally reads a book, and I still speak proper Dutch, without a preference for English words. I know the difference between subject and object, and there is nothing complicated about conjugating a verb correctly. A “d,” a “t,” or a “dt” at the end of a verb? I handle that without difficulty. And I never write “Me and my malicious partner,” but always “My malicious partner and I.” A matter of basic linguistic decency.
When I am eventually carried to my grave by eight sturdy young men, a quarter of Dutch culture will go with me. That has everything to do with the fact that I am from before the Mammoetwet. That probably means nothing to you, but we once had an educational system that was not designed exclusively for the weak. You did not automatically receive a diploma after failing your final exams three times because teachers feared you might otherwise drift into crime. No, you needed a proper diploma with passing grades to enter a life of crime.
You simply took all the subjects that teachers had been appointed to teach, and you did not discard them like a fussy little lady because you were too lazy or too stupid.
The gym, in my time, was reserved for people with a low income and a corresponding IQ. Health insurance was still called the Ziekenfonds and cost thirty-five guilders a month. Premiums could remain that low because all those health fanatics did not need to be transported by ambulance the moment the weather turned pleasant during a walking event or a marathon.
Psychiatrists did not yet have a DSM for all these modern deviations. You were simply mad, completely mad, or deranged, and that did not entitle you to any special treatment. You only had to remember one thing: behave normally. If you did not know how, you observed others. If that failed too often, you were strapped to a rubber table and given electroshocks until you caused less irritation than the average houseplant.
An eight-hour workday was exactly that: eight hours of work. It was not an opportunity to expand your presence on social media. Roads and public transport were not already clogged at three in the afternoon because everyone was heading home. And no, we did not collectively decide to leave an hour earlier to avoid traffic, having learned in mathematics that this would simply move the traffic jam forward by an hour. That worked, because we had all studied mathematics. No exceptions.
Hard-working people actually performed hard labour. No one would have used that term for office workers.
We smoked ourselves to death, including in the doctor’s waiting room, and we died pleasantly early, so we did not burden our children with ten or twenty years of caregiving, as encouraged by a prime minister without children, pets, or, for that matter, a partner.
You did not have to floss three times a day. Eventually you received a porcelain set of dentures that could slip from the soap dish during your weekly shower and shatter into a hundred pieces. That was no tragedy. The Ziekenfonds would simply provide a new one. There was no deductible, but we also did not climb skyscrapers from the outside, engage in absurdly dangerous sports, or attempt to fly from cliffs with hang gliders or ridiculous air mattresses that only kept you airborne if you stretched your arms far enough. We also did not have DNA, so your children were simply yours and not the milkman’s.
No one had a drinking problem. You simply kept drinking at birthdays, and by the end of the evening you would conclude that the same drink “suited” one person better than another. There were perhaps a few hundred junkies in Amsterdam, but most of them came from Germany.
If you were sensitive to the cold, you simply wore a proper fur coat, without being chased by a crowd accusing you of cruelty to animals. Often the same people who insisted on meat every evening.
Instead of an autistic girl like Greta Thunberg, who holds the world record for outraged facial expressions, we had the Club of Rome, a group of scientists who informed us that acid rain had stripped most pine trees of their needles. Evidence was never provided. They also invented the environmental clock, which already stood at two minutes to midnight in the late seventies, and now, half a century later, stands at one minute to midnight and will remain there until the perpetually announced Armageddon finally occurs.
The Russians could do no good even then, because they were troublesome communists undermining our democratic values. Now they are clever capitalists dismantling the international banking system and turning our embargoes into an economic miracle.
At the swimming pools you would still see people missing an arm or a leg, and you knew they had fought in the war not so long ago. We spoke of wars in hushed tones, but we wisely never used the phrase “our war,” because we were simply grateful to still have two arms and two legs.
Madame Boissevin
Part of the Madame Boissevin archive →