WE ARE ALL WORRIED

We are all concerned about the climate. In Holland, there has not been an Eleven Cities Challenge in ten years. That skating race was the first thing I learned about Holland as a country when I was a little girl. I read The Silver Skates by Mary Mapes Dodge, who was an American by the way, so I wonder if she only imagined those frozen canals?

No, the frozen canals did exist. And for many poor Dutchmen the race was the only event in the whole year when they could afford not to go to work, forget all the troubles and fly with the wind. Or against the wind, as was often the case, especially during the race in 1963 when several people froze to death, unable to find their way in the sudden snowstorm. One of the survivors recalled being welcomed in a camping wagon that had set out to save the skaters and seeing another fellow-racer, picked up earlier, masturbating to recover blood circulation.

The frozen canals became symbolic during the cold winters at the start of WWII, when riding against the wind was the only escape available in the occupied kingdom.

In January this year I saw a cherry tree begin to bloom. Crocuses were all out by the first week of February and there has been but one snowy day that resembled an Asian hurricane more than a snowstorm, and claimed several innocent lives.

Meanwhile, what I also know from history is that alongside the frozen canals a much colder disposition was characteristic of the Dutch in the earlier days. Elderly Russian women who once were taken hostage by the Germans during the same WWII and later escaped to Holland, told me what a frozen welcome they received in their Dutch husbands' families. And I am amazed at the descriptions of the Dutch covetous and stingy mentality that I find in some more recent memoirs.

Clearly you have not been to Holland lately, I would tell those people. Because I have not experienced a more colorful and delightfully relaxed atmosphere in any other country in the Northern hemisphere. And oh no, I do not miss the Russian, as one journalist I know calls it, permafrown .

Naturally, Amsterdam has not become Rio, or even Lisbon. But it has definitely accumulated a certain Southern openness for free communication and smiles on the street, openness for gourmet wine sessions, femininity and leisure, and a tiny bit of disorganization, so not Calvinist.

What is going to happen to us when the temperature rises by another 4 degrees in the upcoming several decades, as the forecasts say?

Shall we really learn to live without worrying about the future? Like our Southern brothers? Or maybe those 4 degrees don't make such a big difference after all, if only we manage to stay above the sea-level.