Author: nivtric

Perhaps You Can See the Irony of It

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On a road to nowhere

After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, a populist politician, Pim Fortuyn, gained popularity because traditional politicians had failed to address the growing unease of the Dutch about Muslim immigrants. Fortuyn promoted a messianic personality cult. He called himself the Son of the People of the Netherlands. About the leader the Netherlands needed, Fortuyn wrote in his book De Verweesde Samenleving (The Orphaned Society), ‘A leader of stature is Father and Mother in one. He dictates the law and oversees the herd’s cohesion. The skilful leader is the Biblical Good Shepherd.’ Fortuyn anticipated the coming of the Great Leader of the Netherlands as he wrote, ‘Towards a Father and a Mother, on the way to the Promised Land,’ and, ‘Let us prepare for his arrival so that we can receive him.’ He posed himself as the Messiah. It was one of the reasons I didn’t like him. Perhaps you can see the irony of that.

Fortuyn called Islam a backward religion and claimed that Western civilisation was superior. He valued the achievements of Western civilisation, such as the separation of church and state, LGBTQ rights and freedom of opinion. Many Muslims hold on to a medieval worldview. Still, Islam opposes interest charges on money and debts, and I believed that interest was one of the gravest threats to civilisation, so my views of Islam were more favourable. We could learn something from Islam. Even more so, out-of-control technology might end human civilisation, either through an apocalyptic event or by altering humans to the point that they cease to exist. You can’t blame Islam for that. It is Western civilisation that has brought us to the brink. And if you can only choose between doom and women wearing body covering garments and honour killings, the choice is not that difficult, for a rational individual at least. We are on a road to nowhere,

We’re on a road to nowhere
Come on inside
Taking that ride to nowhere
We’ll take that ride
I’m feeling okay this morning
And you know
We’re on the road to paradise
Here we go, here we go

Talking Heads, Road To Nowhere

The song says that the road to nowhere is to paradise. That is the duplicity of it. Everywhere Fortuyn went, there was chaos and conflict. He seemed to enjoy it. Establishment politicians didn’t like him because they feared he would undermine society. The Netherlands has had a consensus-building tradition known as the Polder model for over a century. Fortuyn broke with that tradition.

False Messiah

Fortuyn saw himself as the coming Great Leader of the Netherlands. History took an unexpected turn. On 6 May 2002, a left-wing loner assassinated him, an event that shocked the Netherlands. ‘The bullet came from the left,’ Fortuyn’s supporters claimed. Exactly 911 days later, an Islamic fanatic murdered the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Fortuyn’s sudden popularity was closely linked to 9/11, while Theo van Gogh had just finished 06/05, a motion picture about the assassination of Fortuyn. Van Gogh was killed on 2 November 2004 (11/2 in American notation), while 112 is the European emergency services telephone number. That points to the hand of God. The Bible has warned us of false messiahs like Fortuyn. I hope you can see the irony of that as well.

Jan-Peter Balkenende
Jan-Peter Balkenende

Fortuyn aspired to become Prime Minister. Instead, Jan-Peter Balkenende got that job. He looked like an apprentice from the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry Potter became his nickname. And that was not a coincidence, as the Netherlands was in for a massive bout of magic. Captain Decker, a song by Boudewijn de Groot, has the following lines,

Captain Decker, Flying Dutchman,
climbs above the timeless
space machine you’re living in,
starts to turn you inside out,
he needs you to know
what he was really all about

Captain Decker, Boudewijn de Groot

The timeless space machine could refer to the place where God is living. A Dutchman may need God to know what he is about. The animated picture Kroamschudd’n in Mariaparochie by Herman Finkers explores the possibility of Christ being born in Twente. My birthplace is Eibergen, just over the border in Achterhoek. In the 1980s, there were plans to create an independent province of Twente. It was to include Eibergen and Nijverdal. Finkers came from Almelo, like Ilse DeLange. DeLange’s fourth studio album, The Great Escape, plays a central role in God’s messages in pop music.

World peace

In December 2008, there were many strange incidents. One of them was that the candy vending machine at the office delivered a particular message. Often, I went there to fetch a Twix bar. This time, the machine malfunctioned and failed to produce a Twix. It repeatedly misfired. That had never happened before, and to my knowledge, no one else had trouble with the machine that day. After trying three different options, it finally worked when I chose option 22: a Nuts bar. That was nuts, even more so because 22 = 11 + 11.

It was about to get even nuttier. To me, 11:11 represents a strange coincidence with two parts. The next day, I bought a bag of potato crisps from the same machine. This time, it worked fine, but after opening the bag, I found a small piece of paper with the crisps. It was a temporary tattoo with the following Chinese text:

世界和平

One of my colleagues knew a Chinese man who translated it for me. The characters stand for world peace. No one else got a temporary tattoo with a bag of crisps. It was a production glitch. The paper had slipped into the bag, perhaps from another product line, and it ended up in my hands. Remarkably, my colleague Ronald Oorlog was absent that day. He had fallen ill. His last name, Oorlog, is the Dutch word for war. Now, that is a funny coincidence. Another colleague, Rene H, joked about the text, saying, ‘World peace is what Miss World would say she wanted after winning the prize.’

Linking it to Sneek

A nursing home in Sneek is named Nij Nazareth (New Nazareth). The nickname is The Banana because the building is banana-shaped. A former neighbour of Allard and Geke, nicknamed The Hedgehog because of his hairdo, has taken residence there. If the name New Nazareth means anything, it could mean that the Second Coming comes from this particular town, which was, by some miraculous accident, my town of residence. It could be that there were other places and buildings with the same name. And so, I used a search engine to look for them, but nothing else came up. Perhaps I was making too much of this coincidence. In the song Het Sneker Café, the unrivalled poet of the Dutch language, Drs. P mocks the making of outlandish connections to a pub in Sneek,

There once was a girl of seventeen years of age,
the only child of a wine merchant,
who sought shelter in the Jura,
because she was lost on a trip.
She found an unoccupied house at the edge of the forest,
and felt from the outset that this is not right.
She took a glance at the window and what appeared:
Inside was the skeleton of a salesman in toiletries,
who had been missing for years
and had once stayed with his uncle and aunt in Bordeaux when he was young.
And there, they had almost exactly the same type of lampshades
as a small pub in Sneek.

Drs. P, Sneker café

There is a nursing home in Sneek named Nij Nazareth (New Nazareth). Its nickname is The Banana because the building is banana-shaped. A former neighbour of Allard and Geke, nicknamed The Hedgehog because of his hairdo, has taken residence there. If the name New Nazareth means anything, it could mean that the Second Coming comes from this particular town, which happens to be my town of residence, perhaps for the same reason that the building is there. To rule out the possibility that there were other places or buildings with the same name, I used a search engine, but nothing else came up, which made it more noteworthy, though perhaps I was making too much of this coincidence. In the song Het Sneker Café, the unrivalled poet of the Dutch language, Drs P, mocks the making of outlandish connections to a pub in Sneek,

You see now how the pub again and again
affects the social interaction.
How here and there, and yes, even overseas
one stumbles upon this pub from Sneek.
It’s inexplicable and almost occult,
something that fills the world with trepidation.

Drs. P, Sneker café

As a prophecy, it is slightly off the mark by focusing on a pub, of which Drs P did not disclose the name, so that it remains a subject of speculation, and not on Sneek itself. Prophesies somehow tend to be off. That seems to come with predestination. If we knew our predestined future, it wouldn’t materialise. Yet there are inexplicable, occult connections that fill the world with trepidation. And that nursing home, New Nazareth, is not the only thing that justifies the trepidation. You pronounce Sneek like ‘snake,’ and there was allegedly a serpent in Paradise. In scripted reality, there is no coincidence, so we can safely argue that there might be more to it.

Pope end times prophecy

In January 2013, an Australian poster on the message board Godlikeproductions.com started a thread titled ‘112 Keeps Coming Up In The Media.’ Others joined in with their own selective biases and found many 112s popping up in the media. That same number is the European Emergency Services telephone number, and since I had lived in room 112 in that fateful dormitory, the thread caught my attention. The discussion remained active for several weeks. During that time, Pope Benedict XVI resigned on 11 February 2013, a highly unusual move. He was the first pope to step down in almost 600 years.

That became material for this thread. 11 February is also the 112 European Day, which celebrates the emergency services telephone number. 11 February is 11/2 in European notation, and 112 is the European emergency services telephone number, so that is why. You must admit the European bureaucrats have found a most peculiar occasion to throw a party. In any case, the Pope’s resignation came unexpectedly, like a bolt from the blue. And lightning struck the Vatican a few hours after the Pope had resigned.1 It made several people wonder, so the thread came back alive.

Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation on European 112 Day is also noteworthy because of the 112th Pope End Times Prophecy attributed to Saint Malachy. The prophecy alleges 112 popes would reign, starting with Celestine II, until the End of Times. Benedict XVI was the 111th Pope. His resignation prepared the way for the 112th Pope, Pope Francis, who, according to the prophecy, would become the last Pope before the End of Times and Jesus’ return. That made me curious, so I investigated the matter and discovered that Saint Malachy had died on 2 November (11/2 in American notation) 1148, and I added that noteworthy item to the thread.

The prophecy raves about the 112th Pope, ‘In the final persecution of the Holy Roman Church, there will reign Peter the Roman, who will feed his flock amid many tribulations, after which the seven-hilled city will be destroyed, and the dreadful Judge will judge the people.’ Some claim it refers to Judgement Day or the second coming of Jesus Christ. It requires quite a stretch of the imagination to make it fit Francis’s tenure, but humans are imaginative beings. Pope Francis died on Easter Monday, 21 April 2025, at the age of 88, and the 113th Pope, Leo XIV, came. My preparations weren’t yet complete, but had progressed far enough to think that the End Time could commence within a few years.

If so, that century-old prediction could be remarkably close in time, even though it doesn’t match the described events. It seems too accurate to be a coincidence, yet not entirely on the mark. The same holds for Finkers’ animated picture of Christ’s birth in Twente. My birthplace, Eibergen, is a few kilometres outside Twente. Likewise, the 9 February 2009 superstorm prediction was too accurate to be a coincidence. The date was correct, but the location was off by about 400 kilometres. Route N666 didn’t precisely end in Borssele, the location of the only remaining Dutch nuclear power plant, but in nearby Heerenhoek within the Borssele municipality. The other Dutch atomic plant, which had been closed, was in Doodewaard (Death Holm), a remarkable name. The former Doodewaard municipality had been 66.5 square kilometres in size, so close to 66.6 that it is noteworthy.


Jesus’ ministry occurred sometime between 26 and 30 AD, a period that will soon mark 2,000 years, which is worth noting. We might find out soon whether or not God finally means business this time. After 2,000 years of waiting, you wouldn’t expect that anymore, and most people live as if Judgment Day will not occur during their lifetimes. And as you might know, the hour will come as a thief in the night. The Day of the Lord will come unexpectedly, suddenly, and without warning. That is to say, if that day ever comes. Likewise, you wouldn’t expect an autistic individual like me to be the messiah. Okay, men with Asperger’s Syndrome tend to be faithful, and God might prefer a man with ‘a heart of gold’, but maybe there is more to it. So, what makes autistic people special?

Latest revision: 11 February 2026

1. Lightning strikes St Peter’s Basilica as Pope resigns. BBC (12 February 2013).

Heaths near Nijverdal

Worried Parents

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The school switched to a new method called the Jena plan. There were no old-fashioned classes. Mr. B was my teacher for four years. He was a gentle person with a beard and perhaps a bit of a hippy. After all, these were the 1970s. You had some freedom. The Jena plan had task hours. Every day, you had one or two hours to perform tasks you had to finish before the end of the week. Once you had finished them, you were free to do as you please. You could read books or make drawings if you wanted.

At the start of the fourth grade, Mr. B gave everyone a weekly task schedule for the entire year. I remember finishing the whole task list for the year in three months. Mr. B then gave me my work for the fifth grade. I then slowed my pace and spent two and a half years, most of the time drawing or doing other things. At the end of the sixth grade I had finished all these tasks precisely on schedule.

The school emphasised group work. That might have been due to the Jena plan. The classes consisted of children from different levels, ranging from the first to the third or the fourth to the sixth grade. They split the class into small groups of mixed levels so we could help each other. We still had old-style classes and different teachers for some fields, such as calculus or geography. Mr. B took personal development, expression, social skills and teamwork seriously. He probably found them more important than learning. And so he reported to my parents that I did well on my school tasks but was a strange kid who didn’t connect with other children, often went out alone during playtime, and acted oddly.

My parents became worried. My mother then forced me to join the Boy Scouts to play with other children and work in groups. Perhaps a psychologist had given my parents this advice. A young woman led the group. In the narrative of the Boy Scouts, she was our mother. She supposedly was a wolf, and we were her pups. We had a yell, ‘Akela, we do our best, and you do the rest.’ I endured being a Boy Scout for over a year while trying to find an excuse to quit.

Then came the epic winter of 1979, with snow storms and temperatures reaching minus twenty degrees Celsius. The bad weather started just after Christmas. On one of the last days of 1978, we split into two groups and went outside. One group supposedly was lost in the forest while the other group came to the rescue. We were the lost group. It took the other group a long time to find us. By then, it seemed we indeed needed rescuing. But no one was injured, so it wasn’t that serious.

After this chilly adventure, I refused to go there again. My mother then made me choose a sport. I wasn’t good at sports and didn’t like them. My father later recalled that I once wrote a hilarious essay about sports being a waste of time and energy. I selected judo because my friends Marc and Hugo did it, too. Judo is about harnessing your opponent’s force to your advantage. Again, I schemed to get out and succeeded after over a year.

My parents sent me to Almelo for psychological evaluation. I went there by bus every week and stayed for hours. Psychologists questioned me and watched me play with other children. I didn’t trust them and didn’t tell them about my thoughts and feelings. After accidentally saying I loved to dream, the psychologist asked me to elaborate. I cut off the conversation and tried to do and say what they expected of a normal child. And I took the hint. In later school reports, Mr. B noted I socialised more and played like an ordinary kid. He also mentioned I had a vivid imagination and appreciated my writing skills.

The report further noted that my desk drawer was a mess. Mr. B then made me responsible for keeping the materials closet in order. But I am very organised, not in irrelevant detail, but in essential matters. My files are currently neatly organised, but the room is not tidy. The drawer needed no organisation. It was easy to find what you needed. The materials cabinet had drawers for various parts, which was a file-type organisation, so I could indulge in organising it, which I did with fervour, much to the delight of Mr B, who believed he had taught me something.

Featured image: Heaths near Nijverdal. Jürgen Eissink (2018). Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Close up of chestnut tree branch at De Famberhorst in the Netherlands

The Tree Garden

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Once I went to bed in the evenings and sometimes during the day, my imagination took over, most notably when sitting on the swing in the back garden. There were several different fantasies, often recurring. In one, I drove a car on a road called De Weg (The Way), reflecting my life path. There is a parallel with the Chinese Tao. And our home had wings and could fly, but only in my imagination. Once, in a dream, all the houses in Nijverdal spread their wings, went up in the air, and installed themselves in new locations during school time, so I got lost on my way home. That gave me the idea.

A few times, I had a crush on a girl. And out of nowhere came a strange and scary imagination. She would consume me or digest me inside her stomach. The inside of her stomach consisted of giant gears that crushed me. That imagination didn’t relate to my feelings for these girls, which weren’t particularly strong, or a fear for them as they weren’t particularly intimidating. It just seemed to come out of the blue. In hindsight, it was a foreboding of things to come three decades down the line.

In the autumn of 1976, I had gathered a bag of chestnuts and left them on the ground behind the shed in the backyard. The following spring, dozens of small chestnut trees popped up on the spot. It was the start of my tree garden in the backyard land and the germinate club that specialised in growing trees, most notably chestnut trees. The backyard land belonged to our neighbour, Mrs. Schaap (Mrs. Sheep). She came from the Dutch Indies and was in her sixties when we moved there. She was a widow. Her husband had died a few years earlier, and the patch would become a kitchen garden tilled by her husband. And so, that land remained fallow, and I could begin a tree garden there.

Mrs. Schaap didn’t mind, and we could get along. I was often on her terrace, drinking lemonade with her. She also drank nettle tea, ate nettle soup against her rheumatism, and let me taste them. They were not a thrilling taste sensation. They were like green tea. Ms Schaap became very old and died in 2014, aged 100. On the other side was a garden centre owned by the Ter Horst couple. The wife often came over to let my mother do her hair. To me, the garden centre was an adventure centre. I could hide between the bushes and trees and move inconspicuously. I saved trees and plants from the garbage heap, sometimes with friends, to relocate them in the tree garden. Once, I sold a plant to Ms Schaap, but my mother cancelled the sale.

For over a decade, Mrs. Schaap had a fancy man, Mr. Langelaar. His wife had dementia and later died. He often came over, and they sat in the garden reading books. Ms Schaap sometimes came to buy a few cigarettes from my mother. She didn’t want to keep them at home as that would make her smoke more. I vaguely remember Ms Schaap having a fish tank in the living room at first. My father later confirmed it. That is noteworthy, as at our previous address in Eibergen, our next-door neighbour was also a lady of the same age from the Dutch Indies with a fish tank. I regularly visited the other neighbours as well. They were mostly older people who had kitchen gardens, chickens, cows and rabbits.

We had a horse, first a pony named Tilly, and later, a real horse, Desi, for my mother to ride. A horse in your pasture attracted girls who wanted to ride it. My mother only allowed Alexandra to do that. She had long, curly blond hair and was beautiful, but she was six years older, so I barely looked at her. As the story goes, she had been on holiday with her parents in Morocco once, where a wealthy man offered her parents 3,000 camels to marry her. My mother sold the horse in the early 1980s when interest rates skyrocketed, and mortgage payments became a drag on the budget.

Trees became special to me. I made drawings of trees and made up stories about them in which they could talk and fly. And I began drawing maps, first of the Netherlands and later of Europe or imaginary countries with coastlines, villages, cities, roads, and rivers. These imaginations made life more agreeable. In bed, a fairy tale world took over. This situation remained so during my teenage years and didn’t change during adulthood. There was a strict disjunction between reality and imagination. I was imaginative but didn’t believe my imagination. That was unusual. Most people are less imaginative but believe in their fantasies.

I still love trees. After buying my house, I left the garden and the trees the way they were, much to the chagrin of my neighbour, a lawyer who wanted them cut down. And I planted Christmas trees next to the railroad near my home. One survived and has grown large. In the early 2000s, a deadly chestnut disease began to kill chestnut trees. They suffered the same fate as the elms culled by the Dutch Elm Disease. That is peculiar, as I was born on Elm Street in the Netherlands and had grown chestnut trees later on. The fact that the elm disease is Dutch adds some juice to this coincidence.

In school, a book once presented the children with a choice about the type of future they preferred. Option one was a sober room with a light bulb. A boy on a wooden stool asked his parents, ‘When will there be electricity so I can read?’ This option represented a simple life with little comfort. Option two was a boy attached to a machine. He didn’t appear all that healthy. It represented an advanced technological society. I chose the first option.

Feature image: Close-up of a chestnut tree branch at De Famberhorst in the Netherlands. Dominicus Johannes Bergsma (2016). Wikimedia Commons.

Primary school class

Primary School

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The Climbing Rose was my primary school. It was a Roman Catholic school, as we were Roman Catholics. We went to Church every Sunday at first, but when I was nine, we stopped attending Mass. My parents weren’t particularly religious and went to Church out of custom. In that Church, I had once made an altar boy laugh by pulling funny faces when he looked in my direction. At some point, he couldn’t control his laughing and fell from his chair. Everyone saw it. When we stopped going to Church, that was a relief. At school, I was a loner, which made me face regular harassment. But I was there to finish school, so I never considered staying at home to avoid the bullying. Instead, I handled the situation by looking at the bright side, with thoughts like, ‘Standing with my back against the wall isn’t so bad, because they can’t attack you from behind,’ or ‘Humiliation is bearable, for most people forget it after a week or so.’ In hindsight, these were most peculiar thoughts that you would not expect of a child.

Sometimes, other children blamed me for things I didn’t do. At kindergarten, a few boys had dug a tunnel in the sandbox, which subsequently collapsed due to the loose nature of the playing sand, which only has limited cohesion when moist. I was nearby, watching the inevitable happen, so they blamed it on me, not on their stupidity. At primary school, there was once a fight between two boys. One boy’s glasses fell on the ground and broke. I was one of the bystanders. Someone might have accidentally stood on them. Everyone said it was me. Only, I had seen these glasses lying there, and they hadn’t been near my feet. Only, no one would believe me, so I didn’t argue. People make things up and then believe their lies. It became an insurance affair, and the insurers agreed it wasn’t my fault as the glasses were already on the ground.

Doing poorly at sports was another disadvantage. Sports at school was a year of discomfort ending on a high note. Before the summer holidays, the last lesson was monkey cage, a freestyle adventure and great fun. The teacher frequently made the children choose teams. I was always the last one remaining. No one wanted me in their team. No one. We had school swimming for a year. Nearly all the children got their swimming diplomas, except me and two others. The following year, my mother made me go to the swimming pool alone to take morning swimming lessons before school. And so, I got the first diploma, A, and the year after, even the second, B. The year after that, my teacher, Mr B*****, once sent me on an errand to another class led by Mr H*********. When I came in, some kid yelled, ‘B*** can’t swim.’ Mr H********* then whispered in my ear, ‘What diploma do you have?’ I whispered, ‘B.’ And then he asked the kid, ‘What diploma do you have?’ He said, ‘A.’ ‘B*** has B,’ Mr H********* said. And then the joke was on him.

My lucky number was twenty-six. You immediately see why it is the most beautiful number of all. That requires no further explanation. My date of birth, 26 November, only played a minor role in my conclusion. It was more like a clue that revealed a profound truth the world has yet to learn. Green was my favourite colour, also for obvious reasons. Everyone can see that other colours aren’t as green. Green is also the colour of success, while red is the colour of failure. If something goes well, you see a green check mark. If something goes wrong, you see a red cross. Even more importantly, it is the colour of trees, except in the autumn when the leaves get different colours, and also not in the winter when there are no leaves. And I love trees. Once, I dedicated a little poem to the number twenty-six. It may go down in history as one of the best poems about the number twenty-six ever written, but that may be due to a lack of competition. The English translation is,

Twenty-six letters in the alphabet,
Twenty-six weeks make half a year
Two litres of mercury weigh close to twenty-six kilogrammes
And oh, how heavy that is.

The poem comes with a bit of fact-fudging with the mercury thing, as two kilogrammes of that liquid weighs 27 kilogrammes, but that is all. And the phrasing was ‘close to’ (zo’n), so it was not a lie. Near the entrance, a sign was attached to the fence. On it was the company’s name that had installed it. On its back, so the side you would see if you left school, someone had written, ‘B*** K**** I**** is crazy.’ The text remained there for years. Everyone could see it as they passed the gate. It was hard to miss. It reminded me of what others thought of me every day. Yet, it hardly mattered because of the wall around me. One day, a teacher gave me a chore near the school entrance and some tools, which allowed me to remove the sign I proved unable to resist.

Throughout my primary school years, I had two friends, Marc and Hugo. They were classmates. Hugo came first. I ran into him while wandering past his home. He invited me in. And so, we became friends. Hugo’s mother had a board position in the Roman Catholic Church. His father was a manager. Marc came somewhat later. His father was a sales agent for a Swedish firm. They had a Volvo. Marc had a room for sleeping in the attic with his younger brother, filled with Legos and other toys. The Swedish firm sold sewing threads, so we had plenty of wire to play with. And there was a radio. They also had a dog, a boxer named Boris. Marc sometimes claimed that boxers had excellent noses and could track anything, so once we were in the forest with Boris, we decided to test this claim by playing hide-and-seek. So, once Boris was lagging, we hid. Then Boris went missing, and we couldn’t find him despite calling his name loudly. That evening, Marc’s parents could retrieve Boris from the animal asylum. Someone had brought him in.

We started a few clubs. I was the instigator. The Inventions Club came first. We raised money to buy technical items and Legos, and experimented with a broken television my mother had left in the attic. We opened its back end, inspected its interior, removed some parts, and put it back together. Marc warned me about the capacitor, which he believed was inside because it had an electrical charge, and we joked about what might happen if we hit it. The television began working again without us understanding how it happened.

Later came the Germinate Club. And the Antiques Club, which was more of an excavations club. We found pottery pieces in the ground and stored them in the shed. That was what the Antiques Club was about. Marc, Hugo and I once buried a tube with a document in the forest. It contained our names, signatures, a date and an explanation, and we hoped someone would uncover it after 1,000 years. Marc and I shared a passion for the radio programme Dik Voormekaar Show, with its funny voices, noises, and everything going wrong, a brainchild of the comedian André van Duin. I truly enjoyed everything he did. Van Duin also made songs and sketches together with Corrie van Gorp. It was hilarious.

Marc was fond of gadgets. These were the 1970s. Japanese digital watches were the thing. They were expensive at first, costing as much as 300 guilders, but Marc soon had one. These watches had features such as a stopwatch, time zones, or a calculator. Hugo was a bragger. The things he or his parents owned were always better. When his father bought a Hyundai, Hugo claimed it was the best car in the world, even though a Hyundai didn’t come close to a Volvo. Japan was catching up, but its cars weren’t yet on par with Volvos in the 1970s. We had a Peugeot and no reason to boast.

One day, when I arrived at school, the children were waiting for me on the path from the gate to the schoolyard. They stood on both sides while I passed, scolding me, ‘B*** K**** I****, fiddle with the willy’. At the time, I had poorly fitting underwear, and my willy was often somewhere in between the underwear and the trousers, which gave an unpleasant sensation, making me regularly put it back in order. And that gave my enemies, and there were plenty as it appeared, a noble cause to rally around. They had all agreed on it and organised the event. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be enough kids to fill the entire stretch on both sides. There were at least 50, but it could have been 100.

The school had some 200 pupils, so that might have been half of them standing there. And they never organised anything. Yet this particular cause was so important that they could muster that number. That is how humans are. And I know firsthand, as the most hated child in the entire school, by far. Marc walked at my side like a true friend, but Hugo was among the kids scolding me. Hugo once explained his friendship as a kind of charity. He said that his mother had told him it was a good deed to befriend sorry kids like me. His mother was a high-ranking figure in the Catholic Church, and Catholics believe that good deeds help you earn a place in heaven. To be fair, Hugo may have been my friend, but I didn’t particularly like him either. But beggars can’t be choosers.

Then there was that strange incident with the plum. Once, shortly after we had befriended each other, I told Hugo that there were two plum trees in our backyard. Hugo insisted that it was impossible, ‘Plums grow on bushes, not on trees.’ There was no way of convincing Hugo. He was sure. We had two plum trees, and it was late autumn or early winter, so the trees were bare, and it was impossible to show him plums hanging in a tree. After the argument, we went to the fallow land behind the shed, which would later become my tree garden. There was also a plum tree, one I hadn’t thought of, and there, high up, hung one shrivelled plum in that tree, which was otherwise completely bare. And I pointed at the plum, saying, ‘There you see a plum hanging in that tree.’ That finally convinced Hugo.

In hindsight, it was most peculiar that there was a plum. One sole plum was hanging there. The birds had not eaten it. The wind hadn’t blown it out. You could almost think someone had left it there hanging for me to prove Hugo wrong. Later, I once talked Hugo out of trying to build a perpetual motion machine, which took considerable effort like the plum. I had just seen a children’s television programme explaining why it would never work. They had demonstrated an electric bicycle powered by the dynamo on the front wheel. It seemed to work, but they had hidden a battery. They explained that without the battery, it wouldn’t have run at all because of a magical force called friction, which we learned about several years later in secondary school physics class. Hadn’t I watched that programme, I wouldn’t have talked Hugo out of the idea, and we might have had such a machine today.

When someone complimented me, I believed they were mocking me or trying to get something from me. Two boys sometimes praised my calculating skills, but they were jeering. In sixth grade, we had mental arithmetic so that we couldn’t use paper for calculations. Once, the teacher, Mr Ruhof, asked us to calculate the average of 1/3 and 1/5. Mr Ruhof then said the answer was 1/4. Everybody had that answer except me, as it was 4/15. I laid out the proper calculation, which we all had learned, loudly in the class. It wasn’t that hard, so it may well be that a few others had it right as well but didn’t say so. More than three decades later, my wife once went shopping with my mother in Nijverdal. Someone discovered she was my mother’s daughter-in-law and asked her, ‘So, you married Mr Headstrong?’ If you are right and they are wrong, they call you stubborn.

I don’t remember my father giving me compliments, except when he said, ‘You are so good at tuning the radio. Can you please do that for me?’ He followed courses named Management Labour New Style. To inspire workers, you praise them and tell them how great they are, so they do what you want. It made me wonder, ‘Does he really think I am that stupid?’ It all gave me the impression that whatever I did, it was wrong or not good enough. My grades were good, but not exceptional. Some children were as intelligent as I was. Hugo was among them. And some might have been smarter. A girl named Madelon comes to my mind. It was the combination of being good at school, a strange loner and doing poorly at sports that made me the subject of pestering.

After initially being timid, I grew more courageous over time. And I liked a good joke. Once, I prepared a smoking device and lit it near the paper storage next to the bicycle shed, making it appear as if the papers had caught fire. The smoke caused quite a disturbance, with teachers and pupils hurrying to the spot. I did it again, but the teachers caught me. At age eleven, I had become the tallest boy at school. I settled some scores and intimidated those who stood in my way. Once, there was an incident with fountain pen refills. We had fountain pens. They had refill cartridges, which some kids, including me, collected to make rings or other objects. Some kids played with them in class, so the teacher took the cartridges from them and put them in the bin. I took them out on my way to the toilets, and they saw me. They demanded them back and threatened me, but I didn’t give them up.

Another noteworthy incident occurred at a school camp. We were bicycling when another kid tried to push me off the road. I didn’t budge and crashed into him, which severely damaged my bicycle’s wheel. It folded, so that it turned into a bicycle wheel equivalent of a Pizza Calzone. The teachers made a school camp newspaper with jokes about my damaged bicycle wheel. I gave the perpetrator a bloody nose, not during the school camp. Only, I don’t remember now whether it was before or after. There were a few similar incidents. The final year’s school report went blank because Mr Beemer used a different ink that didn’t stand the test of time, but I remember him expressing concern about my assertiveness and clashes with other children. Yet, I was a sensitive kid. Once, I accidentally hit a girl or broke one of her belongings. Willemien was her name. She kept complaining about the incident, making me feel miserable because I had wronged her. I could buy her off with a guilder. That settled the matter.

In later years, I felt less hated and was no longer an outcast. During breaks, I was often out with some other boys, doing adventurous things like sneaking off the schoolyard and making plans to do something about classmates we disliked. Twenty-five years later, we had a primary school reunion. My former schoolmates gave me a hero’s welcome. They all cheered when I came in. It felt like an Olympic gold medallist returning to his home village after the games. One of them said that they appreciated my coming. They believed they had made my life so miserable that they expected that I wouldn’t come. All the other black sheep hadn’t shown up. Only, the thought of not coming had never crossed my mind.

Latest revision: 2 May 2026

Featured image: my primary school class

Nijverdal

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Nijverdal is a place that a comedian on national television once praised for the dullness of its weekly shopping evening. And unlike the people of Almelo, the people of Nijverdal for long knew exactly which location you were talking about when you said, ‘The traffic lights’. A few hills surround Nijverdal. The locals call them mountains. Evers Mountain is fifteen metres high. The Netherlands is flat, so fifteen metres can be impressive, especially if you are on a bicycle. Nijverdal is a small town, but the locals call it a village. It didn’t exist before the Industrial Revolution. It is there because, in 1836, a British entrepreneur deemed it a superb location for a factory. That factory is still there.

My father had bought a plot that included a house and two pastures, just outside Nijverdal, on the Rijssensestraat, the main road between Nijverdal and nearby Rijssen. He had the old home demolished and had a new one built. He enlisted my mother’s uncle, Hendrik, who was a retired mason. Hendik lived together with Bet in Eibergen. We sometimes visited them. Hendrik had been a union man, and there were plenty of union badges and flags in his home. My life in Nijverdal began on a sour note.

A few days after relocating, my mother sent me to kindergarten. A new home, a new village, going to school, and being left alone in a matter of days was a bit too much. I cried for over two weeks in a row. They just let me be. After two weeks, in a sudden stroke of genius, the teacher put me in another classroom with another teacher. The crying stopped. No one seemed to care. I was alone in this world, like an orphan. It became a turning point, making me emotionally self-dependent. From then on, I didn’t expect anything from anyone, not even my mother. I erected a wall around me. The hard times began. It is the story I told myself. After all, we see our lives as stories. Today, that treatment may seem harsh, and even though it may not have been common in the 1970s, it had been more common before. Many children have had it far worse.

Western societies have grown sissified. You have to know how my life was, so I can’t avoid disclosing my feelings. That looks like a good excuse. I will use that more often. It is not about telling you how tough my life was, which it was, but how I became the person I am now. So, for me, it was a brutal awakening into a world without love, one that would cast its shadow over my childhood. Nijverdal lies within the Hellendoorn municipality. Also, in Dutch, the name starts with ‘hell.’ Hell and Thorn, you can make out of it. That sounds not particularly appealing. Originally, the name may have referred to elder bushes. Hellendoorn is known for its adventure park. Nijverdal is less well-known. We lived at Rijssensestraat 270a. And the motorway A270 runs from Eindhoven to Helmond. Helmond means Gate of Hell. It is more than a coincidence.

My parents had grown up on small farms. They had been poor, and their lives had not been easy. And so, they ignored my whining just like their parents had ignored theirs. That was not a lack of love. Harsh conditions can make you stronger, so making your children weak is a lack of love. When I was two years old, my mother made me a pair of trousers. They gave me an intolerable itch, but I had to wear them every other week because she made only two. Luckily, I grew out of them after some time.

My father was tough, but my mother was tougher. She would say, ‘Kan niet ligt op het kerkhof en wil niet ligt ernaast.’ It is a Dutch saying that means, ‘If you say you can’t, you probably mean you don’t want to, but you will have to.’ So there were no excuses. She wasn’t the only parent using the phrase. It was a traditional Dutch upbringing. And children, my mother never said children, but always brats (blagen), can never be right, even when they are. That could undermine her authority.

The first television show I saw was Paulus de Boskabouter (Paul the Forest Gnome). It started around 6:30 PM. Afterwards, I went to bed. Later, there was Ti Ta Tovernaar (Ti Ta Magician), about a girl whose father was a magician. She could also do some tricks, like halting time. Once time has stopped, you can do things that will change subsequent events. I fell a bit in love with her. It was the first crush: a girl who could do magic.

Numbers intrigued me. At kindergarten, I chalked them down on the pavement. I associated numbers with genius and wisdom and embarked upon a personal project you might call counting to infinity. At first, I recited numbers on the way back home from kindergarten. My mother was cycling with me on the back, counting. I could ask her questions. After arriving at 99, I asked my mother, ‘What comes after 99?’ ‘One hundred,’ she said. And I continued. The next day, I still counted, ‘998, 999, ten hundred.’ ‘No, not ten hundred, but a thousand,’ my mother said.

Soon, I had mastered the number system. Then, I asked my mother, ‘How far can a university professor count? Is it a million?’ ‘Yes, a university professor can count that far,’ my mother answered. I wasn’t planning to stop at a million but aimed for infinite wisdom. It soon became clear that counting to infinity would be laborious and time-consuming. And so, I divided the effort into parts and started counting in bed in the evenings. And then, I fell asleep and lost count. And so, I had to start over the next day, using a number I was sure I had already recited, to ensure no number remained uncounted. Otherwise, it didn’t count. Somewhere near 16,000, I realised it was pointless and gave up.

Often, I went out alone on a tricycle and sometimes drifted away from home. There were mostly pastures. In the spring, the neighbours burnt the dead grass in the ditches. They said they did it to make room for the young grass. The fire was fun to watch, so I took matches from home and burned a few ditches myself.

Once, we were driving somewhere in an unfamiliar location. The landscape was unusual, with high dykes, straight roads and straight pastures. My father asked me, ‘Do you know where we are now?’ I had no clue. Then my father said, ‘This is the bottom of the sea.’ That was hard to believe, for I saw no fish swimming. And so my father told me that we were in the North East Polder, which had once been the bottom of the sea. Taking land from the sea has been a century-old tradition. In the 17th century, the Dutch engineer Leeghwater, meaning ’empty water’, modified windmills to drain swamps and empty lakes. So, what’s in a name? Leeghwater was not his birth name. He adopted that name when submitting a patent for a diving bell. Dutch water and drainage engineering is a long tradition. The Dutch are excellent swamp drainers, the best there are. As the only country in the world, the Dutch enlarged their territory without taking land from others. Today, half the Dutch live in areas that would be uninhabitable or submerged without dykes.

Money also intrigued me. Once, my mother had bought some groceries. She paid with one banknote and received several banknotes and coins in return, so I asked her, ‘How is that possible? You give one banknote and get groceries, more banknotes and coins in return.’ She said, ‘I gave a one hundred note and received two of twenty-five, one of ten, and some guilders and cents, which is less than one hundred.’ One morning, I found a pile of banknotes on the living room table. The amount was 750 guilders, seven notes of a hundred, and two of twenty-five. I took a one-hundred-guilder bill out and hid it in my room to marvel at it. I was six and had some awareness that my deed was not right. I took a one hundred, not because it was worth more but because there were more of them, thinking its disappearance would be less noticeable. I showed it to my sister, who ratted me out.

My mother had left this money there for my father’s work expenses. There were no bank cards in the 1970s. My father had requested 750 guilders, and when he found only 650, he thought my mother had made a mistake and didn’t discuss it with her any further. And so, it could go unnoticed for several weeks. My parents were about to hand out my first pocket money, so they punished me by postponing it for nearly a year. Once the pocket money finally came, I saved for a year to buy a globe. It had a light inside. You could see the world’s countries in different colours if you put it on. The next thing I saved for was a microscope, which took a year as well.

I woke when daylight broke, sometimes as early as 5 AM in the summer. Not allowed to go out of bed that early, I lay awake for hours, staring at the ceiling and watching patches of sunlight gradually move on the wall as time passed. My room faced the north, so in the Summer, the Sun came in during the early hours. I was probably just thinking and singing songs. I waved my father goodbye from my bedroom window when he left in his car to work around 6 AM.

My father and I had completely different personalities, but we both enjoyed watching old-style cartoons like Tom and Jerry, Tweety and Silvester, Droopy, Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, Donald Duck, the Pink Panther, and Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote. We often went with him to a pub in Daarle, a traditional Dutch pub called a brown cafe, where the hunters in the area hung out. There wasn’t much to do, except going outside or hearing the hunter’s tales. There was a billiard table and a slot machine. One of my father’s friends sometimes gave me a guilder to play with. I had no qualms about hunting and ate duck, geese, and rabbits my father had brought home, but I noticed that the hunters lived in excess. They found it a poor showing if there wasn’t too much meat.

Latest revision: 8 April 2026

Featured image: Royal Steam Bleachery: Exterior Overview Complex With Halls. A. J. van der Wal. CC BY-SA 4.0.