Jinxed
I travelled through to Utrecht this evening for a lecture by Dick Hebdige at Casco. The lecture itself was nothing special, but for other reasons it turned out to be a slightly unnerving evening.
Firstly, as I left the cavernous bulk of Hoog Catherijne (the Cumbernauld-esque shopping centre through which you must travel to get out of Utrecht station), there was what looked like a car which had been sprayed with machine-gun fire and set on fire. This turned out to in fact be an advertising stunt by the TV channel Veronica, but it did set the tone for the night, as I shall explain.
Having listened to the lecture, and leaving once it was clear that there was no more beer left, myself and Julien along with some students from Piet Zwart whom he knows set off in search of a squat building in the neighbourhood, which was rumoured to have a bar. This we never found, but on the way witnessed a minor road accident.
What happened was that a pizza delivery lad on a scooter somehow managed to get knocked off his bike by a passing van. In comic style, a police car just happened to drive by at exactly that moment; cue Monty Python style “‘ello, ‘ello, ‘ello, what’s all this ‘ere then?” We tried to help in a pretty ineffectual way by getting his scooter off the ground, but it turned out in any case that he wasn’t too badly hurt, and since it didn’t look like we would be needed as witnesses, we moved on.
About ten minutes later, we were walking down a narrow alley looking for a bar that didn’t look too expensive, when a woman who was leaving a restaurant with a friend suddenly collapsed on the ground right next to me. She ended up also not being in too bad a way, but it did give me the creeps a little; I was just waiting for a piano to fall out of the sky and land next to me or some such thing.
Thankfully I made it back to Amsterdam in one piece.
