Snapshots from Europe 2024-2025

Places and languages

ROTTERDAM

The city is very grey in mid-September. It seems all new, with no historic old town, this having been bombed out of existence. It’s nice tho, like some British provincial city but accidentally so well-designed and temperamentally so open to reinvention that it ended up awesome.

On the first night, I go to a local bar and surprise my companion with how well I can speak Dutch. I hear the word ‘dorp’ coming over to me and know just what it means. What surprises me are how willing the locals are to encourage me in the use of their language. Perhaps it’s a way for them to differentiate themselves from the English-addicted Amsterdammers. The whole weekend I speak Dutch and realise just how much I enjoy this brusque and expressive tongue.

In the guide recommended Dutch bar – where they do switch to English with me – my companion takes a photo of me I like. I flatter myself I look like a sort of slightly healthier Anthony Bourdain, tho without his passion for drugs and food. A man with good stuff ahead. I like the vibe of the photo.

I turn 42 the next day, and decide that that’s the pose I want to bring into the next year; kind of a chill character you might find in some European bar, unhurried, interested in you and interesting. I’m no longer concerned with being obtrusive, more about holding the space I have. I know myself by now.

On the next day, I go on a bus which turns into a boat on the water and sails around aimlessly on the Rotte for a while. It’s a notable highlight of the year; in fact, with that and Lancashire black pudding for breakfast, I’m concerned I’ve peaked too soon. We go up a tower and photograph the cityscape and the nascent ‘us’.

I’d like to live in this city, I think, just get shit hot at Dutch and hang out in the cafes watching people and writing complicated books. But due to Brexit I can’t. What a colossal act of spite by my country against my dreams, and one which those who did it have absolutely no idea of. But I don’t hate them, or anybody; as I begin my 43rd year, there's a noticeable lack of hate for anybody, save perhaps the President of Russia, in my heart.

Rome in November is as beautiful a place as I’ve been, which is lucky as I’m only there 27 hours. I dash to Zavantem straight after work Friday. The airport is a crazy glut of Eurocrats heading home to family lives of varying quality.

Down by the river Po on a Sunday everything seems sepia-tinted, the bursting autumn trees and yellow and brown everywhere you look. The traffic is reliably dreadful, but nature seems to be gaining the upper hand via all these leaves. And food, too – really good, reliably rich, dare I say decadent food. We eat at two restaurants which are called ‘Eggs’ and ‘Meatballs’ respectively and both deliver what their titles suggest.

It doesn’t go quite so well with my Italian as with my Dutch. This is largely because I don’t speak Italian. Still, I do my best and by the end of the weekend I’ve convinced at least those in the juice bar near my Airbnb that I know a little and am a quick study. As a language nut, I’ve arrived at the point where I feel instinctively I should be able to speak all languages, which the Romans gently remind me is not the case. Nonetheless I learn the word contante, cash, paying for some bananas at a haphazard street market.

On the Saturday morning, I am waiting for my guest to arrive so I go to a café and read a local newspaper and feel like a distinguished Roman gentleman.

Do I want to be Italian? I think I would like to a Dutch writer living in Italy, speaking perfect Italian with a slight northern European twang while I write intense psychosexual novels to shock the bourgeois back home. Too many 20th century dreams remain lodged in my head; those guys (and it was largely guys) had it good. I often think I missed my era, which is of course a tautological thought; aside from the riotously successful, everyone in every era thinks they’d have been more suited to another time, and their imagining of that time is always squarely a product of their age. The medieval era of the Victorians is not the same as our own.

Waiting for my companion to arrive, I consider the pleasure of waiting for people, and think of a line from a song I heard from a band at a Berlin open-mic gig once: ‘Anticipation is better than action’. The bits before things happen are the most pleasurable parts. That’s why youth is good, right, that you’re all in a sort of generational conspiracy waiting for your turn, and it’s absolutely clear that when you cohort get into power things will be very different indeed.

Well, these are pleasurable, these afternoon Ottovianon hours; I mosey from supermarket to pharmacy, picking up treats and looking for some decently-priced aftershave. I’ve had a body odour issue of late, and after multiple attempts to resolve it, even including a doctor’s visit, a simple solution seems to work: I’ve switched from spray to roll-on deodorant. There’s a particular Italian deodorant, Borotalco, which seems to work better than anything; I buy two. Deo salvi l’Italia!

I leave a message in French on my friend’s answer phone and he tells me I sound like Alain Delon. Are your friends just the people who know how to flatter you best? In fairness, the same friend used to tell me I spoke French with a bizarre and inadvertently insensitive West African accent. I’m not trying to culturally appropriate, I plead, I just can’t get the vowels right! Or at least not right in a way which doesn't invite serious questions.

It’s kind of amazing, this Europe business. The way I finished work at 17.00 Friday and be on a plane to Rome via Munich by 19.30. Dipping in and out of the national languages and ways of life. Every country exactly itself. That imaginary Dutch writer would have got 15,000 words of travel writing out of the same journey in 1967, and likely a sizeable fee.

When I was young I often used to think of the phrase ‘Too many miracles’, that the modern world was full of too many benefits, too many incredible things for them to be appreciated as such. I even felt the same applied to us as humans; that the wonders of our lives were now too numerous to be really appreciated in full, which perversely led to us breeding less. The infinite brilliance of the modern world convincing us of its eternal present tense.

Anyway, it was time to get back to the flat with a bottle of cava and cut the bread and cheese.

Later at dinner my companion tells me I look like Salman Rushdie and as I’m banking the compliment a terrible wave of tiredness comes over me. A thought too comes over me which has been frequent this year: Has this all happened too late? The right person at last, but older and tireder and with less time ahead. There’s sadness there amongst the waves of joy.

The next day I hit upon a world-class fika, the Swedish name for a break for coffee and a pastry. My Swedish friend L told me that one of her exs used to get so stressed by family gatherings that he used to have to have an emergency fika every few hours. Since then, I send her pictures of ‘great fikas I’ve had’; this pre-lunch cake and coffee is up there. We eat immediately after the coffee and cake, this at ‘Eggs’. They're not having my Italian at all in this restaurant.

Later, in the Roma club shop I spontaneously decide I am an AS Roma fan and buy a badge and a pair of slippers in the club’s purple and yellow (i giallorossi) colours. I like the colours, and I like Rome. As I’m going through the door to the club shop I receive a notification that a reader has converted to an annual paid ‘Stiff Upper Quip’ subscription; I think it motivates my subsequent financial largesse. I’d like to thank that reader for keeping me in slippers; when my Italian colleagues come for drinks later that year, they are so excited about my household footwear.

In fact I think Italians are generally quite excited about everything, and you need that at 42. I resolve as such to learn the language for real.