Cheese Eating Surrender Wombat

Life pedals slowly along here in The Hague.  Monday rolls into the midweek and on to the weekend like the buns of a fat Dutch lady leaning into a turn.  There is an air of indifference that fills the city, which I must say, I quite like.  Nobody seems to care about anyone else much.  There’s no malice, just blissful ignorance.

I have purchased a shiny dutch bike that I have dubbed “The Babushka” on account of its grandma-ish frame.  It travels at approximately the same speed as my grandma as well, but that is just fine with me.  There is nothing more pleasant than pedalling indifferently through an indifferent city.  Having a bike also offers one the chance to unleash some spectacular cropdusts on unwitting individuals and make a quick getaway, with the added advantage of no “friendly fire” (i.e., cropdusting yourself).

My biggest issue currently is that I really need a haircut.  Some commentators have questioned its timeless style.  In the words of one:

“Dude, what is doing with that mop? It appears that a small rodent has perished on your head.”

(S. Foster et al, August 2008).

It may have perished in August, but Oh! what a glorious afterlife that small rodent has entered!  No doubt somebody paid the boatman his coins and then some.   My current plumage is magnificent: a glorious cross between a wombat (of course), a porcupine and an albatross in full flight.  Spectacular is not enough! Amazing does not even begin to cover it!  Transcendental may be the right word here.

Nonetheless, the rest of the world has never quite been able to enter the dimension of style that I operate in.  It’s not their fault: not everyone has the ability to open wormholes and transcend space and time with their hair.

Regardless, the time has come to remove it, since I do need to retain an air of respectability in my professional appearance. The days of rockstardom are over, for now at least.  I will surely miss it, but that isn’t the problem.  I have only one major reservation:

The prospect of a “Dutch Haircut”.

Dutch are odd people, and extremely proud of it.  They are so odd, in fact, that they seem to have trademarked their oddity with their own saying:

“God created the world, but the Dutch created Holland.”

I think this has less to do with the enormous amount of reclaimed land in the country and more to do with their proud international identity as a sixteen-and-a-half-million-strong bunch of weird people.  On the whole (and apologies for the stereotype) I find them extremely direct (”You don’t look very attractive today”), with a weird sense of humour (they’re big into non-sequiturs). They speak the ugliest language on the planet and enjoy parading naked around their large-windowed living rooms.  The women range from the extremely attractive to the unassailably ugly, with a slight skew towards the latter.  The men, on average, are very tall (at an average height of six-foot-one) and in my observation, tend to possess a larger-than-average Adam’s Apple.

Most, if not all, Dutch men sport a “Dutch Haircut”, or a variation thereof.

Let me explain: there is nothing organic about a Dutch Haircut.  It is a carefully calculated piece of human outrage designed to offend all but the wearer and his Dutch compatriots.  This careful design is a bit of a paradox since the ultimate shape resembles chaotic concept art.  Overly short on the back and sides, the apex of the head and the fringe offers a sprout of unchecked follicular growth that transforms the head into the shape of a question mark.  Blond specimens look particularly disgraceful, especially with huge amounts of hair gel and when riding a queer dutch bike.

It is the kind of cut that people wouldn’t comment on unless they really knew you extremely well, for fear that self-realisation might lead to jumping out a window.

And so, I am afraid that my current rug of glory will morph into a mirror-smashing question mark of Dutch quirkiness.  I am concerned that I, the expat Wombat at large, will look just a little too Dutch, thereby losing my English speaking privileges in Den Haag and suffering great(er) animosity at the hands of the French.  I am also concerned that when my lovely fiancée arrives from the Antipodes, she will not recognise the Wombat she has come to know and love.

So what do I do?  This is a dilemma: please help me out.  I travelled to Amsterdam on the weekend and Brussels the week before, and have penned some preliminary commentaries on those.  Will write more soon, but until then, remain outrageous at all times.

Love,

Wombat