Amsterdam

Amsterdam is unrecognisable to me. These years away have made me a stranger. A tourist. One of the many that flood into the city every day in search of a taste of hedonism. There is a thin line now, a knife edge, between liberty and destruction. Over time the defenders of liberty have chipped away at the royalty, elegance, nobility, leaving us with pure excess. Brownies, ice cream, lollipops; marijuana in every form under the sun. It’s not just the red-light district that is seedy now, but the streets adjoining it. And the streets adjoining those. Seediness oozes from every pore as the litter, stench of weed and stale vomit on street corners grow. You have to work hard to catch a glimpse of our history. Occupation, resistance, liberation. Struggle, death, sadness, triumph. History that is a part of us, a part of the city, now sold for commercial value. One look at the Anne Frank House will tell you that. A once sacred monument of a young girl’s loss of freedom is now overrun with tourists. In bending queues, they clutch their phones and cameras at the ready, chatting, giggling, complaining as they wait for their turn to enter. They come out clutching gift bags of books, posters, a build your own cardboard model of the annex. Some leave with an overawed sense of reverence. A fleeting moment of quiet reflection. But it passes. So do they, heading off for their next stroopwafel, coffee, or to wait their turn to get a selfie in front of the bronze statue of the diminutive Anne Frank.

I was never supposed to be back here. I didn’t fight my way through school, for my place at Oxford University, my graduate job in London, to end up right back where I started. Oxford was nothing like Amsterdam. Books tucked under our arms, minds filled with lofty ambitions, we weaved our way through the city, alongside the mess of tourists with ease. I, like many of my fellow students who were different, who didn’t speak in affected accents, soaked up the atmosphere with glee. The glitz and glamour that was gothic revival architecture, dingy pubs off windy, narrow lanes, and building after building of distinguished history. We were following in the footsteps of the great scholars, writers, thinkers of their time, not fearful or diminished by their accomplishments but inspired.

On my first day in London, I marvelled at its majesty. It was a gloomy, sprawling mess. But it had a character. An unspoken set of rules that all must adhere to. Living in London was adapting to a way of life. No-one cared where you came from, what you were wearing or whether you were crying on a packed train during rush hour, so long as did so quietly without upsetting the natural order of things. Walk slowly and you’d be overtaken. Stand on the wrong side of the escalator and you’d be put right with a civil but curt, “Excuse me.”

For a brief time in my life, I had embraced London as my home. I worked all hours yet was paid next to nothing. Just enough for a box room in a noisy, disagreeable shared house, where spats would break out over the smallest issue and continue on for days in testy, stony silences. In the winter I dragged myself onto the tube, counting out my pound coins for my morning coffee. I should have been miserable. My mother certainly expected me to be. But on those frosty winter mornings, when the warmth of the sun was but a distant memory, I wasn’t miserable. As I strode down the street, overpriced latte in hand, overtaking ambling tourists left and right, I felt only power. And pride.

London’s very anonymity, it’s absolute disinterest in your life, which I’d taken so much pleasure in, was to be my lasting memory of the city. There had been no kinship, no polite offering of a tissue or reassuring smile, as I bawled on the 7:44 Jubilee Line train to Baker Street, having just received a phone call that my mother was dead. My mother, the woman who had been counting the days until I returned home, so sure that homesickness would drive me back to her. The person in my life that I needed the most, who had let me down, time and time again, letting her feeling of abandonment and rejection sour her memory of me. Her love for me. She was right in the end. I would leave London, return home a failure. But not because I couldn’t take it, but because of her. Because her death meant funeral arrangements, paperwork, sinking my meagre savings into paying off her hidden debts, having whittled away my inheritance to nothing. The second I stepped off the train into Amsterdam Centraal, and took in the sight of the bustling city before me, I didn’t pretend to myself that I’d ever go back to London. I knew that once ensnared; I would never get the chance to leave again. Buried in debt, just as my mother had been, I took the only job I could get. In a souvenir shop, selling tat to tourists. I’d fled from this life in haste, only to end up in the belly of the beast.

“Do these come in blue? Or red actually, either is fine,” asked a woman, holding up a pair of painted yellow clogs. They were cheap, the wood dangerously close to splintering in several places. A gimmick of our culture and heritage that would sit on her bookshelf gathering dust, a bygone memory of her fleeting time here. Her accent was English. Southern but not posh, her t’s dropping into v’s.

I plastered on a weary smile, “Of course Madam. This way.”