Falling for London

by Sean Mallen

In a city with so much opulence and wealth staring you in the face, the sight of those two wronged nurses sharing their pain in their modest house has stayed with me. As has the image of the political squatters in the bare-walled joint that they were occupying.

  Back in our slice of the London housing comedy show, April Fool’s Day came and went in a blizzard of packing and cleaning. It was the first anniversary of my accepting the job as Europe Bureau Chief, but there was no celebration. We were busily preparing for a return to Canada for Julia’s month-long Easter break.

  With departure time looming, we scrambled into a taxi to Heathrow, leaving the vacuum cleaner in the centre of the reception room, hoping that in our absence the poison would kill the mice, the landlord would fix the freezer, and that pigs would learn to fly.

  For me, it was a brief visit home. Enough time to see how the two guys staying at our house had put away a few of our less-decorative appliances (my big coffee carafe had disappeared beneath the sink) and replaced them with more fashionable gadgets — an espresso machine, a soda water maker. Our place was remarkably tasteful and clean.

  The guys were busily searching for a new house to buy, but had been continuously outbid. I hoped that they would take their time because we needed their rent money and their care of the place.

  After a whirlwind visit with family, it was back out to the airport, my giant blue suitcase jammed with more necessities for living in London.

  When I heaved it onto the scales at the Air Canada check-in, the agent’s eyes went wide. “Whoa! That’s definitely not getting on the plane.”

  It seems we had managed to exceed the weight limit for one bag, so much so that they would not take it even if I paid for excess baggage. Off to the friendly and overpriced airport luggage store to buy an expensive and remarkably non-durable duffle bag to split the load.

  Upon return, there was an email from our Buckland landlord. In the latest turn of the flat saga, he was now asserting that he should withhold £200 of our deposit, claiming that his place was not cleaned perfectly, that there were a couple of grease spots on the cheapo venetian blinds in the kitchenette.

  Meanwhile, no sign of him refunding the rent we paid for the week when we were forced to live elsewhere.

  With the assistance of Isabella’s American lawyer friend who she had met at sewing, I composed a response. Not only did we expect to have our deposit returned in full (his claims being spurious, silly, and downright shitty), he should be

  refunding a week’s rent;

  paying for the repairs to Isabella’s laptop;

  covering several days of my pay, given that I had to take vacation days to deal with the disaster; and

  paying us a total of £1,779.69. A nice round number.

  I thought, briefly, about forgoing the pay claim before deciding that I was in a mood to be litigious.

  The landlord responded a day or so later with a note that began, “Many thanks for your email” (those Brits have an obtuse way of saying fuck off). Out of the boundless kindness of his heart he was prepared to refund the deposit in full and forget about his claim of £200 worth of damage to his £10 blinds.

  No mention of the £1,779.69.

  Our lawyer friend read his email and said, “It was clearly written by someone who knows he has the upper hand.” She advised that we remind him of his written promise to refund the rent, and if he still stonewalled, to forget about it. “Small claims court is for those who have nothing better to do with their time.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Travelling remained a healthy distraction. No sooner had my two ladies arrived back in London than we were packing our bags for a long weekend in the Netherlands, visiting Iris and Mario.

  For our Dutch adventure, we would be taking the Eurostar train to Brussels, then renting a car — all made a bit cheaper because Global paid for my ticket, since I would be staying in Brussels upon our return to do an interview with the secretary general of NATO.

  We would stop en route to Iris and Mario’s at the famous Keukenhof tulip garden. Isabella wanted to use the opportunity to shoot another of her “Julia’s Europe” travel videos — a decision that risked a stress-out, given that I would be the cameraman and barely knew how to use the camera.

  The famous gardens grew up around the grounds of the seventeenth-century Keukenhof Castle, the name meaning “kitchen garden.” The Dutch may not be known much for their cuisine, but they know their tulips. And marketing. They also know, and value, their friends, having sent shiploads of bulbs to Ottawa after the Second World War as a gift to Canada for sheltering their royal family.

  In 1949, enterprising Dutch tulip marketers transformed the formal castle gardens into a showcase for their product. And now, for eight weeks every year it is the place to go for floral tourists.

  Arriving May 11 was a bit late. Keukenhof was off its peak, but still offered a lush riot of blooms for us to see and video. They have about 350 different kinds of tulips and they plant seven million bulbs every year. Each by hand. The gardeners must have spectacular benefit coverage for chiropractic and massage therapy.

  We got to work on the video, taking the traditional approach when one is surrounded by manicured floral beauty by snapping at each other. It was Isabella’s baby and having done hundreds of lovely design shows, she took command, hoping I could deliver a useable product.

  I carefully framed my beauty shots, working methodically to ensure I did not screw up due to my unfamiliarity with the camera.

  “Sean, you need to speed it up,” she pleaded. I could not match the pace of a real cameraman, which she needed but we could not afford. Our London move had pulled her out of a director’s job where she excelled. The travel videos were an attempt to keep her hand in the game.

  “Jason would have been great at this,” she said, referring to the young videographer she worked with in her previous job.

  “Clearly, I am not Jason, but I am reasonably confident that I can shoot straight and keep Julia in focus,” I responded.

  We had Julia pose in giant Dutch wooden shoes and to point out the names of the different varieties of flowers that we were discovering.

  Isabella approached a gardener named Hans to ask why he was cutting the heads off the flowers. He willingly explained in a nearly impenetrable accent that they had gone off their blooms and that trimming them preserved energy in the bulb below. But we did not have a proper microphone, counting on the camera mic. Hans patiently allowed us to ask the same questions multiple times in the hope that I could capture some sound that might be usable.

  The afternoon flew by. By five o’clock we still had not gotten Julia’s shot in front of Keukenhof’s windmill, nor had we done our interview with the PR person.

  “We can’t go to the windmill. No time,” Isabella declared. In Julia’s Dutch video there would be no windmill.

  “I want popcorn,” demanded Julia. “I want to go on the zip line!”

  Filmmakers have to pace themselves when working with seven-year-old talent, even if it is their own kid.

  We gave her a few minutes on the zip line as the Keukenhof’s patient PR person, Annemarie, waited.

  Having gotten her popcorn and playtime, Julia was a true pro at her interview, keeping her written questions in her lap and showing astounding concentration for a Grade 2 pupil. Annemarie answered with enthusiasm and smiling good humour.

  Sadly, we were close to the exit road on a windy day and without a proper microphone.

  “None of that will be usable,” observed Isabella.

  A working visit to a world-famous tourist attraction can be a trial.

  Iris and Mario’s home was an hour’s drive away, on a country road outside the town of Schagen, north of Amsterdam. The GPS did its job and brought us directly to their door just before dusk. It was a sixty-year-old farmhouse, with a giant thatched roof and rows of modern windmills spinning in the distance. There was a sign in their front window: live, love, laugh.

  Even though their
life seemed prosaic, running a gas station in small-town Holland, putting in eighty hour weeks as small business people, there was something about their openness, sense of fun, and lack of pretension that just made us feel good about being in their presence.

  Their place came with a couple of acres of land, and an old barn that Mario had transformed into an airy man cave. He proudly showed off his beer fridge, an old Coke cooler from the gas station. It was full of pints, even though he drank perhaps a couple a year — leftovers from a recent visit from his family.

  Iris and Mario cooked up a huge load of spaghetti and we sat for hours around their table talking and laughing.

  The next day, Saturday, our hostess became our Dutch tour guide, driving us to an antique windmill named Hoop (Hope) — one of the devices that pumped the water out of the polders centuries earlier. All the land where we stood was once under the sea. We cajoled a cranky Julia into posing in front of it for our travel video.

  Iris brought us into the heart of Schagen, a neat, middle-sized city that traces its history back more than a millennium but has been notable only for a cattle market, a notorious nineteenth-century murder case, and a twenty-first-century innovator named Johan Huibers, who built a replica of Noah’s Ark, which he toured around the Netherlands.

  As we strolled around, Iris reminded me that it was the day before Mother’s Day. She helpfully distracted Isabella so that Julia and I could pop into a shop to buy some appropriate chocolates.

  The travel video still hung over our heads as we searched for photo ops. In a grocery store, Isabella spotted a giant chunk of edam cheese and dragged Julia over to pose in front of it. By now both of them were cranky and it turned into an ordeal. It was unlikely to make it into the final product, given that Julia looked like she had just been told she was being sent to reform school.

  Escaping from that situation, we set off for the shores of the North Sea where we met Mario because he wanted to show off his passion for kitesurfing. It was a clear, blustery spring day at the beach.

  “Not windy enough really for kitesurfing,” said Mario with no irony. “But I’ll try.”

  Sixty years old, but without a trace of fat, and he was about to let a kite drag him along the bounding waves of a famously rough sea while somehow keeping his feet on a little surfboard. He admitted to taking a few tumbles when he first tried the sport but now had the hang of it.

  “How dangerous is it?” I asked.

  “Couple of people die in the world every year. But no one here in a while.”

  He explained that the biggest hazard was to have a rogue gust of wind lift a kiter airborne like a gonzo Mary Poppins, blow him over the dunes, and smack the hapless sap into the wall of a building in the adjacent village.

  Mario managed to keep himself on the board on the sea.

  “Sean, you’ve got to try this!” he urged. I smiled, nodded, and said nothing.

  We piled back into Iris’s car because she wanted to show us one of the great feats of Dutch engineering. A short drive to the north was the Afsluitdijk, which Google Translate tells me means “enclosing dike.” It is a prosaic name for a very long dam with a large purpose. Thirty-two kilometres long, it was built in the 1930s across the mouth of the Zuiderzee, the storied bay of the North Sea.

  The Zuiderzee had an unfortunate tendency to get whipped up into horrific storms that unleashed devastating floods. A fifteenth-century deluge killed about ten thousand people. Fed up, the Dutch built the Afsluitdijk to bring a measure of calm to the waters. The name Zuiderzee, though poetic and storied, disappeared because it was no longer a sea. Cut off from the North Sea, it became a freshwater lake, IJsselmeer, and the Dutch filled in large portions of it to make more land for themselves.

  A highway runs along the Afsluitdijk and our host pulled over in a parking lot partway along to give us a look. On a walkway over the road we could see that the level of the North Sea on the left was several feet higher than the IJsselmeer on our right. The Dutch know water.

  Back at the farmhouse, Mario and Iris whipped up another comfort food supper and we lounged in their living room and talked and talked, long into the night. Julia listened with interest to the adults’ conversation for hours until she passed out in the easy chair. I carried her upstairs to bed. Isabella talked with her old friends until two in the morning. There is something about the serenity of being able to sit up and blab with someone long after you all should have gone to bed.

  In the morning, our hostess was bleary-eyed as she stumbled downstairs. “I never stay up that late,” she said.

  Small business people do not often get that luxury.

  We needed to be on the road back to Brussels by midafternoon, but we sincerely did not want to leave. Our hosts felt the same. Mario is a master entertainer of kids. He took Julia to the back field and let her drive his little garden tractor, an experience that lingered with her forever.

  He had not forgotten his determination to have me sample kitesurfing. He pulled out one of his smaller kites, a mere two metres wide compared to the twelve-metre one he had been using on the North Sea. On their field, he stationed me at one end of the lines while he lifted the kite up to catch the wind. I leaned back with all my modest weight, almost parallel to the ground and wrestled with it. The kite largely won, yanking me back and forth, threatening to take me on a Dutch version of Dorothy’s trip to Oz.

  My first priority was not to die and secondarily I did not want to wreck his kite by crash-diving it into a fence. After several minutes of amusing him and Julia by being yanked around like a middle-aged rag doll, I managed to guide it down to a gentle splat and thank Mario for the experience.

  We lingered longer than we should have; our schedule squeezed even more by a last-minute decision to shoot more video.

  Down the road from their farm were fields of tulips, the last lingering blooms of the season. Holland’s landscapes are pedestrian and unmemorable — hard to be inspired by such flatness. The exception is tulip time. The fields are transformed into vast rectangles of luscious colour. We chose one that was an expanse of bright yellow; a hue so intense that it seemed someone had thrown a giant tablecloth from Provence over the dirt.

  It was video gold.

  Julia posed for some shots and delivered a few lines to the camera about tulips in Holland in what was likely questionable sound quality and we were done.

  There was now little time to spare. We wolfed down a few sandwiches at Iris and Mario’s and regretfully said our goodbyes. As we hugged, she said, “You know, even though we’ve only met once, it seems like we’ve known each other a long time.” True enough.

  As we drove away, Isabella said, “You know she has some psychic qualities?”

  I normally say “mumbo-jumbo” to such things, but with Iris I was not so sure.

  We were lucky that the highways were clear of traffic and the speed limit was 130 km. Julia slept most of the way, meaning we faced no demands that we pull over at the first view of the golden arches. A speedy journey was timely because the GPS gave us the slowest possible route through Brussels to downtown, driving entirely through what appeared to be side streets with endless traffic lights. As the clock ticked ever closer to the train’s departure, my search for the station became increasingly frantic, with the GPS reverting to uselessness. Finally, I pulled over, rolled down the window and called out to two young men on the sidewalk: “Ou est Gare du Midi?”

  They looked at me with sardonic smiles as one of them slowly raised his arm to point at the gleaming glass edifice directly in front of me.

  Merci, M. Dickhead.

  Now the challenge was to find the parking lot for the rental car. I did a couple of laps around the station, barely avoiding driving the wrong way down a one-way street or onto streetcar tracks before finding the proper entrance.

  By this time, both Isabella and Julia were desperate for the bathroom so they piled out of the car while I grabbed the suitcases and ran to keep up. We left the car with a royal mess and
a nearly empty gas tank, having spotted not a single service station on our cross-country route through Brussels. The agency later added a $200 gas bill to my credit card.

  Naturally the bathrooms were conveniently located at the far end of the station from the Eurostar entrance.

  “We can always catch the next train,” puffed Isabella as we power-walked through the crowds.

  “No you can’t. The tickets can’t be changed.”

  “Oh.”

  As they dealt with the call of nature in the ladies’ room, I grabbed a slice of takeout pizza for Julia to eat on the train. When they emerged I advised a brisk walk back to the Eurostar. At the gate, Isabella was suddenly unable to find her apartment keys. I gave her mine so she and Julia would be able to enter our overpriced London flat upon return.

  After frantic kisses and goodbyes, I watched as they passed through ticket check-in and out of sight, twenty minutes before departure. They would make it after all. I took a deep breath to slow my heart rate back to something approaching normal and walked over to the taxi stand.

  It was a short ride to the Hotel Metropole, a lush old belle époque gem. Upon check-in, I kicked off my shoes and plopped myself on the bed. As I stared at the ceiling, the phone buzzed with an email from Isabella: “Close call.”

  Turned out that we had forgotten the necessity of filling out a U.K. entry card before embarking. She completed the paperwork and they got aboard with a mere three minutes to spare. Glad I was not there to share the experience.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  With Isabella and Julia safely en route to England, my primary challenge now, as it usually was upon arriving in a grand European capital, was to find the best possible place to eat on the company’s dime. Brussels is not only a government town — the capital of Belgium and home to the EU and NATO — it also has a reputation as one of the world’s greatest gastronomic centres, so my expectations were high.

  The front desk recommended a place a couple of blocks away, but when I scanned the menu in the front window I decided that it was too pricey to justify to the bean-counters back home. So, I wandered over to a touristy neighbourhood near the market, where shills were standing out front of joints hoping to wave me in.