When his mum picks me up in the car from the airport she tells me, I give it 3 months.
He’s horrible.
He’s charging me 300 guilder for the rent and it turns out the council is charging his sister only 200 guilders.
His sister is living with a really dodgy bloke who comes round with his mates sometimes and I get a bad feeling from them.
I start looking for somewhere else to live pretty much immediately.
I get a job quick though, a good one, with Philips in Amsterdam.
There was an incident when I went to look at a flat in Amsterdam and it was obviously a hooker’s joint; the Russian woman who met me was driving a very expensive red sports car, it was all very dodgy…
Anyway, I get my wisdom tooth out, and it doesn’t heal properly and I’m unwell.
Patrick - probably for the first moment ever - is extremely kind to me and says he’ll make me some soup.
So he does.
From then on I become extremely ill, not just a little bit, and I end up in the hospital with blood poisoning and leave Alkmaar and move into a colleague’s attic in the Rivierenbuurt with no toilet or shower - just a tap - but it’s home!
Roseanne Pompeus (Paul and Matt’s sister) and Simon Collins come over to Amsterdam for Queen’s Day.
I have not long got out of hospital and my immune system does not exist because of the antibiotics I was given intravenously.
They visit me at my studio flat and we drink a lot of beer.
My tolerance for alcohol is super low.
Next we go and see Roseanne’s friend Deak who is visiting his mates who live in Amsterdam too.
Now, Deak is friends with Roseanne through Martine, and Martine is the woman who dropped out of going to Benidorm at the last minute in 1997 - the PA to the Beatles man in Abbey Road.
I wonder if she was warned not to go because of what had just happened.
Anyway.
Simon and Roseanne leave me with Deak and his friends and we go back to theirs.
One of Deak’s friends is Barry White, who, incidentally, worked for Goldman’s while I was there in 2018 - I didn’t meet him but saw his profile pic on the intranet and knew it was him.
I get extremely drunk and they give me a tiny bit of cocaine and I make an utter idiot of myself and feel like I want the ground to swallow me up the next day - I don’t think I have EVER made that much of an idiot of myself!
So I’m feeling very sorry for myself and I eventually go to meet everyone the next day in a bar in the Oudekerk area.
I’m very quiet and embarrassed, and unwell too from having drunk too much.
And the woman that was with them all, who I never met or said hello to because I was dying with embarrassment, a woman I believe I only ever met once (I might have met her the night before briefly too), I saw the other day at the thermal springs in Cauterets.
I knew I recognized you. So nice to see you again - sorry for my dreadful behavior in Holland and unfriendliness at the time. Yeah, was your name Bianca? I’ve no recollection but it sounds a bit right.