I am temporarily part of a family at the moment. I’ve fled my home to endure the festive season elsewhere. One of my chores for the past two days was to do the cooking. This turned out to be quite a job as the daughter of the house is both wheat and (bovine) diary intolerant and the eldest son cannot eat fish.

Usually for special circumstances like this, I have a fail safe recipe: green risotto. It’s vegetarian, kosher and halal and -last but not least- it’s about the only thing my girlfriend wanted me to cook when it was my turn.

Unfortunately it contains pesto, which contains cheese (usually Parmigiano, Pardano or Pecorino), so it’s not suited for vegans or people who are intolerant to anything made from cow’s milk.

To make things worse it’s winter and the local stores are out of fresh basil. I had to improvise. Luckily I knew the recipe for pesto, and I knew a trick for making pesto when out of fresh basil. So here we go.

Ingredients

• olive oil (1 or 2 tablespoons)
• risotto rice (1,5 cups)
• white wine (1 cup)
• water (4 cups)
• salt
• red pepper (1, diced)
• green peas (1 bag)
• pesto (1 cup)
• grated cheese (goats cheese in this case)
• scallions (sliced)

Preparation

Fry 1,5 cups of risotto rice in olive oil until golden brown or at most for 3 minutes, whatever happens first. Add white wine and water (in that order, you don’t want to miss the smell of the boiling wine) don’t forget to add salt (this dish can deal with quite some salt, it’s hard to overdo it), half-cover the pan with a lid and leave to cook over a slow fire for about 20 minutes or until all the water has gone. Stir once or twice while simmering. Add diced pepper and peas, mix until pepper and peas are hot. Add pesto. Serve with generous amounts of ground pepper (freshly ground tastes best and again: this dish can deal with a lot of pepper), grated cheese and sliced scallions (in that order).

Normally I use ready-made pesto, but this time I had to improvise on account of the cheese and the shortage of fresh basil.

Ingredients

• some dried basil and/or fresh basil leaves
• loads of fresh parsley (but preferably fresh basil if available);
• olive oil (enough to keep things smooth)
• grated cheese (normally Parmigiano, Pardano or Pecorino, but this time ordinary Dutch goat’s cheese)
• pine nuts

Preparation

Use a hand blender to shred the parsley and basil to bits. This works best when some olive oil is added to turn it into a smooth mixture. It’s important not to put too much olive oil in as this will lead to ever-increasing amounts of pesto. Better start with a little and add extra olive oil when necessary. After mixing the parsley/basil and olive oil, stepwise grate some cheese into it and blend on. The general idea is to add olive oil when the mixture becomes to thick and grated cheese or pine nuts when it becomes to thin. When added in small quantities, the hand blender can deal with whole pine nuts.

I used a trial-and-error method, which worked fine, but didn’t give me exact quantities. I estimate that I used 8 to 10 cups of parsley, a handful of fresh basil, two teaspoons of dried basil, half a cup of both olive oil and pine nuts and roughly the amount of a whole cup of cheese, ungrated that is.

Keep adding the required ingredients until the stuff you are making looks and tastes roughly like pesto…

A quick and dirty estimate is better than a long description.

Wolfgang Schlager

Due to circumstances I’ve been rewriting my will (nothing serious, just a trip abroad). That activity prompted a strain of thoughts about what I would like as a text on my gravestone. Incidentally: I don’t want one, but suppose I did, what would I like to have written on it?

Most people only have their names and dates of birth and death. My dad’s gravestone also mentions his profession, but he was an organist. That’s something worth mentioning. Things like ‘accountant’, ‘chief executive officer’ or ‘ICT specialist’ hardly are. So I’m lucky to be an archaeologist.

Yet, I would not want my CV on my gravestone. As someone once said: ‘When you’re dying, you’re not going to worry about whether you’ve spent enough time at the office.’ So I asked myself what I would want mentioned and I came up with a surprisingly odd list of things that I am proud of and would like to be remembered by:

• I taught my god-daughter to read her first two-syllable word (‘castle’);
• I donated blood 95 times;
• A friend of mine and me regularly visited (both at home and in the hospital) a former university teacher of ours in the course of the year in which he was seriously ill;
• I spoke well at his funeral (so well in fact that one of the other speakers jokingly promised me I could speak at his);
• I never ever fell out with friends (apart from loosing track of them and -sometimes- picking up the thread years later);
• I designed a Roman bridge for an archaeological theme park that still stands today;
• When, only months after being married, the wife of my colleague ran off and he got to talk about it at work at the wrong moment, I kept some prospective clients waiting for their appointment for half an hour to give him time to talk;
• With friends we managed to find a place where an Iranian refugee could sleep for a night;
• I wrote one good poem (about the thrill of sleeping next to a woman and hearing her breathe);
• Every night in winter I made a hot water bottle for my girlfriend, who needed her feet warm in order to sleep;
• When a friend of mine decided to stop drinking alcohol, I abstained from alcohol during Lent to provide moral support (incidentally: it runs totally counter to the idea of Lent to say this);

And that’s it. No professional achievements, no relationships, no knowledge or scholarly activity. I surprised myself big time: this isn’t me at all, it’s just the things I consider my real achievements, the ones that I think are worth remembering. They’re surprisingly minor details. How little you can do that really matters. Maybe the French are right: Il faut cultiver son jardin.

Inertia: there’s a lot of it in the universe, even without dark matter.

Niall O’Reilly

When I was still a student, sixteen years ago, I was a little afraid of Simon. This was not caused by his enormous stature -he was even larger a man than me- but by his rather special sense of humour: edgy, sober and very direct.

When you walked into his room he greeted you with the phrase: “Nice of you to have dropped by!” And that’s where you still had to start saying something…

My fear of him passed away when I visited a conference with Simon in Mainz.

In the evening he took me with him to a restaurant where I absolutely had to eat Schweinehackse, because it was the local specialty and because it was the favourite dish fo Bundeskanzler Helmut Kohl.

After the conference he took me to one of the many museums in Mainz, to a meeting with two archaeologists that -as I only understood later- were very high up in the German world of archaeology.

Simon knew everything and everyone in his field, from top to bottom. And everyone knew the man with this enormous stature. ‘Der Gorilla aus Holland’ our easterly neighbours called him.

Simon didn’t see a problem in taking a junior archaeologist, barely out of university, to a bunch of high-brow, top archaeologists. To him, everyone counted.

I sounds like a paradox: nobody likes to worry, but when it’s not going well with the people we care about, we do want to worry. Even if it’s bad news, you still want to know.

This could be noticed in the period right after his second operation: it was uncertain whether he would make it. In those days people from here and far away came to visit him. Friends, but also colleagues, from all over the country. Every evening, there were different people beside his bed and those who did not visit, used different ways to show their interest.

He was proud of this. It dragged him though.

Now it looks like I want to give ourselves -those present here- a pat on the shoulder: we managed to do this! Well, yes, we did, but that is not the point.

The point is that Simon had this rare gift which allowed him to attach people to himself in a personal way. Everyone: friends and colleagues, at home and abroad. All these people were naturally inclined to worry about him when this was needed.

We do not have to worry about Simon any more and we don’t have to drag him through anything anymore. This is good for him, even when it is painful for us.

Eulogy spoken at the funeral of Simon Lieuwe Wynia (1935 – 2005)

You don’t easily forget the scent of the woman in whose arms you have regularly breathed out your last breath. Even if it was only an affairette, the aftermath of it is like fine, grinding sand that settles into every crack of your life. The sound of high heels on the wooden floor. The way the waitress in your local bar puts off her glasses. Accidentally putting down two plates for breakfast.

But smells last longest and hers is a perfume. Poison by Dior: a perfume with notes of orange flowers, honey, cinnamon, coriander, pepper, cherry, rose, tuberose, wild berries,  jasmine, cedar, sandal tree, vetiver, musk, vanilla, heliotrope and opopanax, according to the advertisers.

That scent can suddenly fall upon you from behind: the hairdresser that bends towards you to cut your sideburns, the cashier that says ‘sorry’ when she wants to pass by the queue, an African girl with a saffron headscarf in the tram.

Even when you walk out of your own house with a friend, when you cross your own street minding your own business and go to your own cafeteria to share a fish & chips, it happens to you. A woman crosses our path and leaves an oriental trail of flowers.

‘Poison.’ I grumble.
‘How do you know?’ she asks.
‘Her!’
She is silent.
‘That scent,’ I tell her, ‘is a memory every time: we take a stroll though the park; share a cigarette; we kiss.’
‘That will pass.’ she comforts me.
I protest: ‘I don’t want it to pass!’
She smiles.
‘That will pass too.’

Nothing, really nothing is sacred.

During my recent visit to Regensburg in Germany I bought a copy of Schachnovelle by German author Stefan Zweig. In the train back home, I reread it in one go. I had to read the book in school, but somehow it escaped the fate of all books you have to read in school. It ended up as one of the books I consider formative literature: those who haven’t read it, cannot possibly understand life.

The plot itself is relatively simple. A group of people on a passenger steamer between Buenos Aires and New York manage to organise a chess game between themselves and the chess world champion who happens to be on the ship. They lose their first game. Halfway through their second game they get advise from a passer-by, who saves their lost position to a draw.

The group then tries to coerce the passer-by to challenge the world champion in a third game. At first he refuses, but eventually he gives in. He wins. When the world champion suggests a rematch, he agrees, even though he has indicated before he only wanted to play one game and no more. The man loses from the world champion but in a very particular way. He gets more and more excited and when the world champion declares ‘checkmate’, he looks at the board and concludes that all pieces are in the wrong place. A near-nervous breakdown is the result.

Two substories give the book its depth. The first story is about the background of the world champion, a simple farmer boy who -judging from the description- is clearly autistic, although the word is never used. His talent is chess, but otherwise the man is a complete stranger to this world.

The second story gives the background of his reluctant challenger. An Austrian accountant who before the Anschluß, worked for rich monasteries and large landowners and helped them move their capital abroad when the Nazis took over. The plot is found out and he’s arrested, put in prison and interrogated. He’s not physically tortured, but completely isolated. He has nothing to do, nobody to talk to except his interrogators.

He would have buckled, but one day he manages to steal a book from the room where he’s questioned. It’s a collection of chess-matches. After the first disappointment he decides to use the book to teach himself chess. He memorizes all 150 matches and then starts playing against himself. Since he doesn’t have a chess-board and pieces he does this all by heart.

Given his isolation and the schizophrenic situation where he has to play against himself, he quickly works himself into a frenzy. His mental breakdown eventually earns him his release from prison: a friendly doctor manages to get him out on the grounds on insanity. This doctor tells him never to play chess again, an advise that he doesn’t take on the boat between New York and Buenos Aires.

What makes this book ‘formative’, in my view, is how Stefan Zweig describes the way a perfectly normal human being can get locked up in the world that only exists in his own head. Zweig makes an otherwise unimaginable process imaginable to the reader. Madness somehow becomes normalcy, the idiot is given back his humanity.

And of course the German it is written in. Schachnovelle is one of those texts that show you what a beautiful language German is.

The other day I was having an excellent dinner with a former colleague. Everything went fine until we had our deserts. She had ordered pistachio ice cream and I had crème brûlée. She didn’t like her ice cream.

As I hadn’t touched my crème brûlée yet, I offered a swap.
‘Don’t you want to taste my ice cream first?’ she asked.

Now here was a dilemma for someone who never fails to seize the moments where you can pretend to be a gentleman. If I would taste the ice cream, I’d either like it or not. In case I didn’t, she’d insist on not swapping, which would mean she’d have to eat the ice cream she didn’t like. Now that’s a chance a gentleman cannot take. So there was no other choice but to not taste the ice cream and do the swap.

It puzzled her when I explained that I wasn’t going to taste the ice cream and do the swap anyway.
‘Gentleman’s bushido,’ I tried, ‘there’s no other option.’
Enjoying her crème brûlée, she still concluded I was a ‘really special guy’. She looked confused when she said that…

The other day I was discussing the qur’an with a Muslim. Somehow we got sidetracked and started talking about the differences between Sunni orthodoxy and the Mu’tazila: whether God needed to reveal himself to mankind, or whether He was completely sovereign and whether His sovereignty was uncompromised by revelation.

Naturally your man asserted the latter, far be it from any Muslim to think that God needed to live by any rules or restrictions. My view was entirely Jewish: if God wanted to reveal himself to mankind, the least He needed to do is speak human language. That is a restriction.

But surely this was entirely sovereign and voluntary! A matter of completely free choice on Gods part, my Muslim friend claimed. This was a point that I agreed with, but it wasn’t the point I was trying to make. My point was the possibility of God bowing down, sinking to His knees -so to say- the way an adult does to speak to a child. Revelation required that. If God decided to reveal Himself, it also ment He chose to lower Himself to a more or less human level, or at least a level where He could be understood by humans.

He agreed with me on that. After a short silence he said something that startled me: ‘Basically, that’s the Christian idea of the Incarnation: God choses to become human, because communication requires one to become the other, sort of.’

Once we had established that this was probably the first time in history that a Muslim and a Christian had found a way to agree on the idea of the Incarnation, there were further comparisons to be made.

Christians differ from other religions in that they drive the idea of the Incarnation to its utmost consequence: God becomes fully and extensively human, to a point where He even shares their ultimate fate: death. But there is no essential difference between that and other revelation-religions that ‘require’ God to bow down and become in whatever way ‘incarnate’. In Islam God has become a book, an object just as helpless as a Jewish peasant under Roman rule, my companion observed.

I thought he was referring to my compatriot Geert Wilders, who suggested ripping a page from the holy book in his cut-and-paste masterpiece Fitna. But no: he was referring to the holy text, which was just as helpless against mullahs, tollahs, muftis and ordinary believers as its physical pages were against platinum blonde politicians. ‘Still’, he admitted, ‘a ripped page is nothing like a crucifixion.’

And then it dawned on me: we were even closer than we thought. Because nothing as cruel as a crucifixion was necessary according to Christian doctrine, at least not for our salvation: a lacrima infantis, ‘a tear from the baby’ would have sufficed to save mankind. Even though a tear would not have constituted much communication between God and mankind, there is room for lesser evils than a crucifixion. Just a tear was enough to make God incarnate.

We finished our teas and took leave of each other in the happy certainty that we had solved the problems of the world that were upon us and in the equally but less happy certainty that surely, nobody would heed our advice on this.

I want you to stop talking now, otherwise you don’t hear anything.