grave

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Not that I’m thinking of popping off anywhere anytime soon, but it would be hard to pass up an offer currently running at Antwerp’s Schoonselhof necropolis, last resting place of such luminaries as writers Hendrik Conscience, Gaston Burssens and Marnix Gijsen, composers Peter Benoit and Armand Preud’Homme, and artists Pol Mara and Vic Gentils.

The deal is, for a mere €800 you get a burial place for two people, to be used within the next 50 years. The one draw-back is that you have to move in, as it were, beside what we shall refer to as a previous occupant. In fact, it’s not even as ghoulish as that, since when your time comes, and you are gathered to your Maker, they’ll open up the plot, take out the bloke who’s in there and who can hardly be said to care by this time, and make a space for you.

It is, as graveyard guide Jacques Beurmans pointed out, a more democratic system than the one operating at the turn of the 19th-20th century when the graveyard was opened. Then, the biggest and the fanciest stones, the statuary and the cellars (a kind of marble lining for the hole, which will incidentally push the price up to € 1,600) were the preserve of the rich alone. Now, the price is the same for everyone, and they’ll stick you under someone else’s stone. In return, while awaiting the day when you cash in your chips, you get to keep the place looking trim and tidy, which is actually the secret plan behind the whole scheme.

If you’re a bit strapped for eight C-notes, I did discover that you can adopt a gravestone for a mere €7.50, which brings the privilege of keeping the monument clean and maintained until you die, when you can go and be buried somewhere else, cheapskate. That could also be an option for those of us who don’t intend to die within the next 50 years. Though frankly the way medical science is going, we’ll all have life expectancies of 250 years just at the moment the asteroid strikes, so you have to wonder if it’s all worth it. But I digress.

So much for being buried. If you’re going to be cremated, meanwhile, try not to fill the air with too many dioxins. That’s what happened at the Antwerp crematorium a week or so ago, when the dioxin levels were pushed up to three time their legal limit. The director said a filter had accidentally fallen out, but my question is: what do we need dioxin filters at crematoria for anyway? Well, it turns out the evil-sounding emissions are produced in many forms of combustion, like volcanoes and forest fires. When I tell you another major source is meat being grilled on a barbecue, I trust I need explain no further.

When I die, I hope it’s in summer, so that the crowds who were unable to be accommodated in the church don’t get cold and wet standing outside. Some people, on the other hand, want to go out of the world as they came into it: as a pain in the butt who keeps everyone waiting. That’s why a Dutch funeral entrepreneur is now offering the possibility of being taken to your last resting place – whether that’s a fancy second-hand grave or a nice warm barbecue – in a caravan. So you’ll be able to die as you lived: creating long lines of traffic behind you. The caravan in question, funeral director Dick Mijnhart said, only has room for the coffin. So, considerably more spacious than most caravans, then.

Finally, the city of Nola near Naples in Italy (where Caesar Augustus died and Giordano Bruno was born) is giving a free funeral with casket and hearse (though not those ostentatious wreaths of flowers formed into words associated with Italian funerals in Francis Ford Coppola movies) to deceased persons who have been organ donors. Sign up to hand over your kidneys, heart or cornea (and whatever other offal the science whizz-kids are transplanting these days) and the city administration will pick up the tab for your transport into the World Beyond. And none of your cheap one-previous-occupant rubbish, either.

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lingo

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Gelukkig nieuwjaar and bonne année, and isn’t it wonderful to be living once more in a land with a government?

Well no, not so much. I’ve been saying all along that we’re better off without the buggers, and the first thing they do when they finally get their act together is ban the fireworks, close the Christmas market, shut down the Big Wheel and drag the little kiddies screaming from the arms of Rudolf, well okay maybe not the last bit.

Meanwhile the factional differences that created the six-month schism have been papered over, as we saw with the ordeal of Alizée Poulicek, who was booed after she couldn’t understand a question put to her in Dutch. Part of the reason was that the crowd resented the way she had been elected and then took power without waiting for the courtesy period of half a year, and didn’t even give the chance to Jean-Luc Dehaene or Herman Van Rompuy – both considered great beauties in their day – to try for her job.

The other reason was her lack of language skills, which might seem a little extreme to outsiders – the story made international headlines – but is even more extreme to us insiders. It illustrates once again the ambivalence at the heart of the Dutch-speaking soul.

The reason for the inability of foreigners to speak Dutch is often said to be the Dutch-speaker’s unwillingness to let you practice on them. They speak better English than we speak Dutch, the excuse goes, so you never get a chance. That’s perhaps true with your cosmopolitan Dansaert-Kaaitheater élite. It’s hardly the case with your average market-trader, say, or communal functionary, or the cop behind the desk.

It’s my observation that Dutch-speakers don’t actually want you to speak their language, and go to a lot of trouble to learn English just so they can steer you away from any attempt to do so. Why do you think it is that while other countries in Europe pay bad actors to put terrible dubbing over the dialogue of films, Holland and Flanders don’t? That’s right, they’re making sure even the couch-potatoest and ill-educatedest still pick up a smattering of the language of Ricky Gervais, even if it’s only “Fork handles, eh-oh Tinky-Winky, e’s bleeding snuffed it!”

It’s my considered opinion that they don’t want you to learn their language because it’s their last hold-out in the face of the crushing weight of being surrounded by bigger countries in this European Union of ours. Gone are the days when Dutch ships could sail up the Thames to bash the English in their moorings. Gone are the days when Netherlandish painters ruled the world. Gone are the days when scientists from the Low Countries like van Leeuwenhoek, Huygens, Bidloo and Tulp enlightened half a continent (the half above the Rhine, give or take). Nowadays Holland has coffee-shops and chocolate sprinkles you put on your sandwich (allegedly) while Flanders has some ridiculous fashion and Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Ah yes, but they can still talk about you behind your back, even when you’re sitting right there in front of them. And that’s an enviable ability, as any Macedonian or Estonian or Finno-Ugric or Geordie will tell you, though you won’t know that’s what they’re doing. It’s something I used to think we could do in Glasgow, so that when I hitch-hiked to the continent with Pat Barrett, and we were getting tanked up on tiny 20cl glasses of foamy Heineken on top of a stomachful of chips with mayonnaise, we cheerfully made rude comments about our neighbours at the bar, thinking ourselves incomprehensible (in the way a baby thinks he’s invisible if he can’t see you) when in fact those guys most likely not only spoke perfect English, but also knew all of Stanley Baxter’s Parliamo Glasgow routines into the bargain. There we were laughing at them, and all the while they were laughing at us. An illustration of European relations that’s as valid today as it was then, you might say.

Toodle-pip, and tot ziens!

fortuyn

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It was a beautiful sunny morning, but a second after I awoke, I was filled with a feeling of dread, as if I’d been drenched with a bucket of cold water. And the terrible thought struck me: Ad Melkert won’t be around anymore.

It’s a sign of the times that the name will mean something to half a dozen of my readers, instead of none at all, as before. Melkert is, of course, the head of the list of the PvdA in the Dutch elections, who was unceremoniously booted up the arse by the collective clogs of a nation. On the evening of the result Melkert resigned, although nobody yet has been able to tell me what his position actually was.

He owes his fame to Pim Fortuyn, who is the reason why the world’s media were in Holland last Wednesday to cover elections none of them had even known ten days before.

That was before Pim was murdered, achieving in a stroke what generations of Dutch politicians were unable to achieve in their entire careers: world recognition. He was following in the footsteps of the likes of Jim Morrison or James Dean, by dying before his potential could prove to be a disappointment. Pim lived fast, died (relatively) young and though he didn’t exactly leave a beautiful corpse, he did leave one that was plastered all over the newspapers’ front pages.

And so a legend was born; but the Dutch weren’t content just to visit his grave (he’s been buried once, and he’s soon to be buried again in his mausoleum in Italy) and leave angst-filled graffiti. No, they had to go and bring down Ad Melkert.

My second thought on that fateful morning-after was: “What the bloody hell do those stupid cloggies think they’re playing at?” The Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF), took 26 seats in the 150-seat Parliament, up from a total of, er, none at all in the last elections, or indeed ever. The list moved into second place, above the party of Prime Minister Win Kok. Which means that the Dutch electorate came within a hairsbreadth of electing a dead man as their leader.

That’s no exaggeration. Although the list was stuffed with living people for appearance’s sake, Fortuyn dominated it in every way. In the nine days after Pim’s murder, I saw two list-members mentioned by name on the TV, but only once each. I couldn’t tell you what the names were, and I’m convinced the Dutch voters couldn’t, either. And yet they’ve sent 26 of these shadowy, faceless, anonymous creatures to Parliament. It’s hard to imagine anything more dim-witted.

So the world is asking the pressing question: is the rise in stupid voting a threat to democracy? Never mind the menace of the far-right. The voters in France showered Le Pen with votes in the first round to send a rocket up the establishment, then two weeks later elected Smilin’ Jack Chirac with a landslide that would have given Saddam Hussein a red face. Now the Dutch, boiling over with grief for a flamboyant dandyish homosexual with two lapdogs and a bug up his butt about Islam, have expressed their sorrow by voting into government a bunch of nobodies.

The threat to democracy is clear. The values of Big Brother have entered the political arena, and I’m not talking about George Orwell’s creation. A new recipe for political success has been created: take one outrageous media-savvy personality, preferably with some outlandish character traits. Put into his mouth some saloon-bar platitudes so the man in the street will feel his voice is being represented. Have him dominate his party completely, leaving everyone else in his shadow. Then, at the last minute before polling, arrange to have him whacked (animal rights nutters are cheaper than Sopranos-like hitmen, I hear). And hey presto! Your placemen are inside the gates of power with never a moment’s scrutiny being aimed at them.

For obvious reasons I’m not too amenable to becoming such a figurehead myself, although I have some of the media profile. But if you think you have what it takes to lead a new popular movement to electoral success, get in touch and we’ll install you at the head of the Sour Grapes List in time for next summer’s Belgian elections.

The lights are going out in voters’ heads all across Europe, and a wave of bone-headedness threatens to engulf the Continent. It’d be a shame not to ride the wave for fun and profit while we can, don’t you think?