The first afternoon in Amsterdam –

and I know it sounds like I am never in London anymore, but first of all, I am, I am working, and no one wants to hear about working, and second of all, you try dealing with this summer in London, meltingly hot one day and then frigid and grey all over like doom the next, and see if you don’t run away to the continent as soon as you can –

The first afternoon in Amsterdam, we walked up Zeedijk, me and Olive, past the Chinese bakeries and Japanese restaurants, to the window that said Rock ’n Roll. It was lovely in there, all vintage wallpaper and laminate tables, and music that sounded like the sun coming through the leaves. A sign tied to the wall with baker’s string read Pompoen soep, but it was warm out, and I wasn’t really feeling like soup, pumpkin or otherwise. Behind the counter (and behind the cute counter girl), the menu was white letters pressed into black display boards. Sandwiches, it read, and then below that, Dutch farm cheese, Dutch goat cheese, Peanut butter, Jam. Soup of the day, it read, is veggie and homemade. There was more. Apple pie was in letters twice as big as the other sweets. I went for an unpronounceable. “What,” I said, “is the thing that looks like it is pronounced ooits-my-ter?” A furrow wrinkled the brow of the cute counter girl behind the counter. “The?” she said. “Um, there,” I said, “above the omelette.” She turned. “Uitsmijter,” she said, then added: “It is eggs, um, boiled?” “I’ll take it!” I said, and then turned to Olive and said, as if my saying it would make it so, “Can’t be bad, right?”

We sat upstairs, up the narrow wooden staircase, with the vintage breadboxes and old-timey milk jugs for sale. I could smell cheese on the grill. We were very hungry.



We’d arrived at Schiphol just an hour or so before, and taken the train to Centraal. “When we get out of the train station,” Olive had said, “all sorts of people are going to come up to you and offer to sell you drugs.” “Just so you know,” he’d said. “Just so you know,” I’d said, “there is something about me, I don’t know what it is, but there is something about me that makes no one, ever, in any country, offer me any kind of drug.” I may have drawn a square in the air around my head. It is true: Henny used to say, about Washington Square Park in New York, that she couldn’t walk through it without someone trying to sell her a dime bag of weed. “They will come up to you,” she had said, “and they’ll be like, ‘Hash? Hash?’” In Washington Square Park they did not come up to me, not once in six years, and at Centraal station in Amsterdam, we walked free and clear through the station and to the street without being approached by a single dealer. Were it that dealers were calories!

We’d taken Zeedijk to the hotel, our rolly bags clattering on the small, uneven street, and I am sure I was open-mouthed and wide-eyed in wonder. The names of the cafés were painted on their windows in rapturous, curling letters. The buildings were narrow, and a comic shop keeled so far to the right that I wondered how the door still opened in its frame. A hidden garden revealed an outdoor café. The buildings parted to reveal a canal, and bridges beyond it, and the city even farther beyond.



Amsterdam after the uitsmijter – it turned out these were three fried eggs, over easy, slumping languidly upon thick slices of dark, grainy bread – was made for walks in the sun. We went south into the Grachtengordel neighbourhood and strolled clockwise around the city’s spider’s web of canals. Here, the streets are lined with handsome façades of quiet, gabled houses, each stone stoop inviting a sit-down. Through the thick glass windowpanes, I saw: a sailboat. A buddha. A set of painted accordion screens. We crossed gentle arcs of bridges curving over Herengracht and Keizersgracht and, further on, Prinsengracht (the Gentlemen’s, Emperor’s and Princes’ canals, though where the ladies gathered and preened remains unclear); we wandered in the cobblestone streets, skipping out of the way when the bicycle bells rang behind us.



We would see, later, mothers and fathers cycling through the city on their bakfietsen – so-called box bikes that include a wheelbarrow-like wooden crate attached to the front of the bicycle, just right for carrying a small child or two, bags of groceries, a dog with its tongue out. “I want,” I would say later, and I knew this was an inachievable goal, “to raise a Dutch child.” I think, now, that it may perhaps just be easier to get a bakfiets.



Later, too, swept up in the crowds along Prinsengracht the day of the Gay Pride parade, we would discover Foodware, a poky and charming deli with a spread of takeaway treats. We would have eaten in, ordered from the open kitchen in the back and sat at the small tables covered in green-ginghamed oilcloth, but outside the sun would be sparkling off the water, and we would hear the parties on the boats already beginning. We would get a small container of gorgonzola and artichoke pasta to go, and then I would see, before turning away, out of the corner of my eye, a chocolatey square of chocolate brownie sprinkled with chopped pistachios. “Is that brownie nice,” I would say, “or is it amazing?” and the storeboy would look me in the eye and say, “It is amazing.” “One, please!” I would say, hearing the cha-ching! echo in my mind, and he would slide it into a white box with a knowing smile.



So much would happen later. Later, Saturday later, we would wake up in our giant bed and open the windows at our sweet hotel to the garden below, where the cat would be exploring the dirt and the flowers. We would go downstairs to breakfast, where Rachel laughed ha-ha-ha and Pepijn was a quiet man who made the most amazing scrambled eggs. I would help myself to a spoon of Pepijn’s homemade orange marmalade, then another, then, giving in, a great, uncompromising glob next to a croissant hot out of the oven. “This marmalade is just great,” I would say, and Rachel would tell me that it was a Delia Smith recipe. “You can make it at home yourself,” she would say, “but be ready for a very sticky kitchen afterwards!” “Ha-ha-ha,” she would say, and we would fall a little bit in love with her hotel, and her breakfast, and her good life running a small hotel and sitting outside in the middle of the day to read on a small bench by the Kloveniersburgwal.

Later even, Sunday breakfast later, Rachel would say, as I tipped the box of Tony’s Chocolonely chocolate sprinkles on a slice of cornbread toast, “Aha, you have discovered the hagelslag.” The guttural gs would make the chocolate rice even more delectable, more succulent and wonderful, than it already was. “Yup,” I would say, then, and I would smile with my lips together because I would feel the chocolate rice stuck in my teeth.



There are stories in later. Later, we would sit at the bar at ’t Smalle, while the bartender man explained with his hands that smalle was small like this – his palms facing together to measure a narrow space – and that klein was small like this – his palm facing down to measure something short. Later, as well, in the Jordaan, we would meander through the market stalls at the Sunday Boerenmarkt, where there would be bread and oils and honeys on cloth-covered tables, where there would be great wooden crates of pumpkins and greeny-red apples, where there would be clear-glassed bottles of freshly squeezed juices in shades from orange to strawberry pink to deep, beety crimson. Later, always later, we would enter the white-walled space of the Foam museum, where Malick Sidibé’s serious-faced Malians, proud and young and expectant, would look into posterity from 1960s and ’70s Bamako. Downstairs in the foam café, we would sit down to espressos and, impulsively, on a blue-and-white plate, a slice of dark chocolate tart, its dark chocolate heart melting in our mouths.



Later, as the boys and girls rode by, one perched effortlessly on the back of another’s bicycle, so perfectly postured, so damn bilingual, we would explore De Negen Straatjes, the Nine Streets, with their cafés and pancake restaurants and little thing shops full of little things. We would head, later, for the Bloemenmarkt – “a floating flower market”, the guides would read, and our faces would fall at the sight of a line of samey shops selling tulip bulbs and flower pots on the bank of the Singel. “What is this?” I would say, and I would turn to Olive, frowning. “This is not floating,” I would say, as we fought our way through the tourists, and Olive would point out that the backs of the flower shops hung over the canal. “If a dog hovered his ass over the water to poo in the canal,” I would say, “would he be floating?” “No,” I would say, “he would not,” and we would exit stage left down Leidsestraat.



One rainy night, later, we would cross another bridge, in another part of town, to dine at De Kas. The dining room would be a light-filled space, a wide conservatory with white-clothed tables and clinking glasses of wine. We would order champagne, because, come on, and we would have to fight ourselves to not devour the crusty bread and the plump olives before the meal was served. We would eat soft scallops and flower petals and a small stuffed squash; we would eat fried courgette flowers and a sweet focaccia topped with bitey rocket and slivers of salty Parma ham. There would be a berry ice cream for dessert, and the macchiatos would come with little madeleines. The night would darken around us, in this elegant greenhouse southeast of the city centre, and before we left we would take a quick tour among the basil plants, the baby courgettes, the heritage tomatoes sleeping.



Quite some time later, before we packed our bags and jiggered and rattled them back up the cobblestones of Zeedijk to Centraal station, we would walk up seedy Warmoesstraat in the red-light district, where the neon flashed on either side of the rain-slicked street and the shops displayed pleather and videos. We would turn in through the high doorway at De Bakkerswinkel and breathe in deep, for the smell of freshly baked bread would be a comfort on a wet day. We would not have time to stay for lunch with the chattering crowds, but we would come away from the take-away counter with a jar of blackberry jam, a thick slice of cinnamony apple tart and half a heavy loaf of multigrain bread, still warm from the oven.



Truly this was all to come, but for now we had uitsmijter and omelettes in our bellies, and the city was unfurling, canal by shimmering canal, bridge by arcing bridge, in front of us. We would eventually return, that first day, our feet tingling, for a late-afternoon nap in our crisp-sheeted bed up the narrow, vertiginous stairway, but that would be, you know – later.