April 26, 2012
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Amsterdam, Netherlands
The picture shows my savings. Actually, it shows the scaffolding that’s in front of the house on the street side, but to call it my savings would be more accurate than you’d think. The builder who is usually on this scaffolding all day and all week told me on Tuesday that the work on the street side of the building was close to completion, so the scaffolding would soon disappear. That’s good news and bad news. It’s good news because that means that I will soon get my view back, and I particularly enjoy the view on that side of the building (it’s one of the main reasons I bought this place) but the bad news seems to be that the work is far from over. Why they are thinking of taking the scaffolding now already is beyond me but it gives me one more question to add to my list of questions about what all went wrong with the repointing. This is not over yet.
I spent the evening watching TV and that is quite an exceptional thing to do for me. The reason is that last weekend the Dutch government fell because the three right wing parties involved in that coalition could not decide on a set of austerity measures so that the government could make the 2013 budget targets as set by the European Union (and strongly supported by, yes, the Dutch government itself.) Then, three opposition parties and two of the government parties sat together and in two days came up with a comprehensive set of measures to indeed reach that target. The debate in Parliament tonight was fascinating to watch. Suddenly government parties had turned into opposition parties and vice versa, while some parties remained in opposition because they’d been sidetracked. For me, the news that the government had fallen was most welcome news. I despised the troika of parties and their cold and harsh austerity measures (while at the same time of course making the super rich comfortably super richer) so the fact that we’ll have news elections in September and hopefully a more social government thereafter is definitely a good thing in my book.
