DIARY
TONY PARSONS Amsterdam amam a little worried about my future, so I have come to Amsterdam to relax for a few days. Big mistake. What made me think that Amsterdam was a city where you can relax? There's nothing remotely relaxing about all these sex shops, knocking shops and coffee shops where you can't, in fact, buy a cup of coffee, but you can purchase vast ' quantities of mind-warping drugs. Amsterdam is not a city to which you come to relax. It's a city for the grim business of having fun. Call me an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy, but I do not want five-speed vibrators, battle-hardened prostitutes or a spliff the size of a Cornetto. Those days are long gone. I was in Amsterdam 25 years ago and felt like a sailor on shore leave. Now I feel like a retired rear admiral with a touch of arthritis. 1 do not ask much from this place — just a quiet beer, a few pretty canals and a couple of hundred canvases by Vincent Van Gogh. That will do me fine. But you can't even wander around Amster- dam in peace. You will be staring at some gorgeous canal, dreaming of Vincent and Theo, when a metallic tinkle-tinIde will alert you to a horde of gormless hippies on white bicycles bearing down on you. At least in Islington you can hear the traffic coming. I should have gone to Stockholm. Amsterdam is a tourist town. All roads lead to Walletjes, the red-light district, where tattooed beer monsters in England football shirts eye up whores with faces carved out of granite. Nobody looks very happy. Everyone is afraid that they are not getting their euro's worth. I decide that I have had enough of Walletjes to last me a lifetime when I chance upon a magazine called Ani- mal Love. There's a fat middle-aged man performing an indecent act on a rather startled-looking goat. Like everyone else in the red-light district, the man with the goat in his mouth looks as miserable as sin. The goat looks as though he can't quite believe his luck.
It's half a lifetime since I was in Amster- dam, but for anyone who grew up when the world was post-Pill and pre-Aids, this place looks strangely familiar. The sickly-sweet smell of hashish. The tatty idealism. The feeling that being young somehow conveys moral superiority. It's the Seventies all over again, man. All you need are a few spotty heads in greatcoats carrying their vinyl copies of Led Zeppelin III, and it really would be yesterday once more. Amsterdam is the city where the Eighties never hap- pened, the town where we children of the Beatles never had to grow up and apologise for all our self-righteous hedonism. Although it feels as quaint as a peace sign, you can't say that it's a complete failure. Get away from the English crew in Wallet- jes, and Amsterdam is a genuinely tranquil place. Wonien walk unmolested. Men sport bicycle clips. Nobody thinks that peace, love and understanding is a bankrupt phi- losophy. You don't see old people in Ams- terdam. The middle-aged hippie is about as wrinkly as it gets. You don't see lots of little old ladies with their cans of cat food. When the air is thick with Thai stick, it feels like Amsterdam's clock stopped at 1969. In the coffee shops, idealistic young people talk of globalisation, corporate culture, changing the world. Then they ride their bikes straight into the nearest canal.
Iquite like these coffee shops. Once you get over your shyness about ordering a mere beer instead of one of the ready- rolled spliffs they have stored behind the bar (and listed helpfully on the drugs menu), they are a good place to have a i peaceful Heineken. I haven't taken drugs since I shared a gram of amphetamine sul- phate with the Sex Pistols' Johnny Rotten when we were floating down the Thames on Jubilee Day, 1977. After seeing some good men kill themselves with various white powders, I became profoundly anti- drugs. But Amsterdam's coffee shops make me think again. There's no hint of aggres- sion in the air, nobody saying, 'Oy you carnt — are you looking at my farking joint?' Surely these places are a vast improvement on our dreary pub culture.
The women of Amsterdam are among the greatest beauties in the world. Tawny blonde, impossibly leggy, naturally athletic and yet somehow shining with intelligence, they look as though they could show you a good time and then discuss Vermeer's inte- riors until dawn. But the prostitutes of Amsterdam are the most hideous tarts on the planet. They all have faces like a public urinal. You would be a fool to touch them with your umbrella without sticking some- thing on the end of it. Yet it's difficult to avoid them. They get everywhere. In Ams- terdam there are secret drinking dens that do not appear in any Rough Guide. They are invariably imposing town houses, nowhere near the red lights of Walletjes. Inside you find either a chintzy drawing- room or a funky bar with a dance floor the size of an onion bhajee. These places are full of working girls hanging around on one side of the room like wallflowers at a teenage prom. They do not hassle the weary traveller who just wants to nurse his lonely cocktail. I like the secret drinking dens of Amsterdam, but their champagne is too cold, too pink and grotesquely over- priced. Just like the women.
ter a couple of hours choking back emotion in the Van Gogh museum, I decide that I am never again going to whine about the pressure of success. How many paintings did Vincent sell in his lifetime? Two. And did he whine about it? No. He just topped himself. The Rijksmuseum Vin- cent Van Gogh is the most moving museum in the world because it is so full of encroaching madness. But if there is a theme, then it is not madness but loneli- ness. The loneliest painting of all time has to be `Korenveld met Krain', that muddy track winding through a cornfield shad- owed by deathly crows. Nobody knows for sure, but this is said to be the last canvas Van Gogh painted before killing himself. Poor, lonely Vincent. He was a little wor- ried about his future.
Previous page
