—Do you need the milk?

—No, there’s no cereal left.

—It’s very good with the biscuits. But I will not tell you, so I can eat them all myself.

The book I’m reading is the first Narbonic collection, a previously-web comic about evil mad scientists; there are four more and a sixth on the horizon. The story’s over (and rerunning as “The Director’s Cut”, with commentary), the archives are open, you know what to do.

Sincere thanks to Freek for the photo, Shaenon Garrity for the comic, and the Dutch weather for the opportunity. Well, two out of three ain’t bad, no?

A drug-addled woman, a girl really, lay
On the front doorstep — what was she trying to say?
“Just let me come inside to pick up my stuff,
A backpack I left here, it’s harmless enough.”

We told her she’d never been inside before,
We picked up the glass where it lay on the floor.
Police and an ambulance (blood on her face),
Explanation? You kidding? Of course, not a trace.

The glazier is coming to patch up the door,
We’ve picked up the pieces and we’ve vacuumed the floor.
We’re glad that it didn’t turn into a fight
And we hope that the next time she’ll get the address right.

A couple more pics below the fold.

Between our balconey and the boat he’s standing on there’s about two metres clearance. So I’m standing no more than five metres away with the camera pointed at him, shuffling about and muttering to myself, and he’s … preening. Don’t play poker with this guy.

Funnily enough, earlier that very same day I was ranting about how bizarre the body-plan of a bird is when you look carefully. (You can see it in the baby meerkoeten: they’ve grown a lot but they’ve still got baby feathers, so the actual shape of the body shows through more clearly.)

I rest my case.

Mama takes good care of them.

First off, last Wednesday I got an email from my brother. “I’m in Amsterdam for three days,” he said, “what’s your number so I can call you?”

We haven’t seen each other for four years, but we’ve still got a few things in common.

Then on Thursday Nick and Nic from my old university in Dunedin mailed to say they were going to be in Amsterdam this weekend, we should hang out. Andi had some hospitality club folk staying, so the houseboat was pretty full and pretty fun.

We did some time on the town, but (perhaps thankfully; the red light district is de rigueur for Amsterdam tourists) most of the photos aren’t that stunning.

Running along the street I took a tumble and dislodged some internal hand-mechanism (it’s much better now, thanks)…

… which turned out to be really bad timing because Saturday night was the biggest rebetika session café Dionysos has ever seen. Olga made the following list:

• 4 bouzouki (at least)
• 1 tzouras
• 5 baglamas
• 3 guitars
• 1 laouto
• 1 banjo-like instrument (with 6 double strings) the name of which I can’t recall
• 1 violin
• 1 clarinet
• 1 mandolin
• 1 accordion
• 8 logicians

We played (yes, “we”, one of those baglamas was mine) until 6:30 Sunday morning. I didn’t take any photos (next time, I promise!) but Olga did — this one gives you a tiny taste of the crazy-full room and incredibile multitude of strings.

And now it’s back to work and back into the routine. (Some sort of book-related outburst should be appearing soon though, I’m expecting a couple of packages…)

The story has been building for a while. The shed is completely ruined, half the roof isn’t there, and the window facing onto the street has been smashed in for months, leaving a hole big enough for a determined junkie to crawl inside. (The landlord has promised to fix it up, but since we don’t use it and he wouldn’t want to, there’s not much incentive for it to happen quickly.) First there was a guy sleeping in there in the daytime … he said he was just crashing for a few hours, really needed the sleep, didn’t intend to stay. And he left, and never came back.

Then a couple of weeks ago somebody put a sheet of fibreboard over the window, on the inside. I guess I assumed it was the landlord, slowly getting started on doing something about the situation, but it turns out it was more uninvited lodgers — permanent ones this time.

I never saw them, but a friend of Andi’s who lives in the area said that he’d caught them there at six in the morning, that they were Bulgarian, and seemed like decent fellows. When I spoke to Andi about it he was pretty happy with letting them stay, and I didn’t have much feeling either way.

Not everyone in the household was as generous or as apathetic though. The idea of junkies around our house 24/7, knowing when we were home and when we weren’t, seeing all our laptops through the windows, this started getting disturbing. And then the question of a toilet came up, and in some winds the yard was smelling a bit nasty.

So we contacted the landlord, who said he would do something about it, but was moving typically slowly. And Maria realised that she was leaving for a holiday in a week, and assumed (wrongly, as it happens) that we would all be taking holidays too — the thought of leaving the house empty for a month with junkies nesting in the shed was too much. She called the police, and they came around this morning. The Bulgarians were removed, and the landlord is timbering the broken window shut this afternoon.

It turns out, though, that they weren’t junkies. They were street musicians, in Amsterdam for the summer season. Gypsies, if you like. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them playing out the back of Centraal Station — accordion and oboe, not fantastic but definitely professional (in a street-musiciany kind of way).

And this puts a completely different spin on the whole question of whether I want them living in our tumbledown shed. I don’t mean that I’d automatically invite them in because they’re part of the brotherhood of musicians, and I certainly don’t want to invoke romantic images of gold earrings and poaching rabbits by calling them Gypsies. But professional rough-sleeping travellers earning a minimal living by playing music are a different kettle of fish to junkies unable to function any more in society.

In retrospect, I should have gone and checked them out myself. (I would have recognised them, if it’s the guys I think it is.) And we still probably would have decided not to allow them to stay (the toilet issue is bulking large in the reconstruction here) but somebody (probably me) should have told them that, before getting the police involved. I don’t know how much legal trouble they’re in now, but I should have thought about it, and I guess Maria didn’t before calling the police.

Looking back, I let other people check out the situation (Andi’s friend), come to a decision (the flatmates), and take the action to enforce that decision (the police), none of which I’m comfortable with after the fact.

There’s an ashamed Kiwi in Amsterdam today, hoping that three Bulgarian street musicians don’t get deported.

(Note to southern hemispherites: the wagon wheels are a fixture. And yes, that’s an open fire, and yes, that’s a luxury in Amsterdam.)

Here’s the photographer; as you can see from his expression, he’s just tasted that beer: