posts interesting only to me

So I moved house

Published on January 4, 2024Leave a comment

To finally get enough room for my books.

A view from the hallway of my library, showing book cases on three sides, stacked with books.

This is why I haven’t posted since November. Ever since the pandemic normalised working from home I have been thinking about moving back to my hometown. With my parents in their mid-seventies and especially my mother having had a couple of nasty accidents, I wanted to move nearer to my family, most of whom live in the same city. Early last year I decided to get serious about it and started looking for a house to buy. Several false starts later and I found one less than 500 metres away from my parents. Bought it, then had several months of doing all the boring bureaucratic stuff to get a mortgage and get all the various utilities up and running, not to mention arraigning a moving company to get all those books (over 150 boxes ultimately) here. Which left no time and little energy for posting once I could finally move in mid-Novemeber. Sorry.

I have been so very lucky with all this. The apartment I had bought with Sandra back in 2005 sold after literally a week of being listed on Funda, for more money than it cost to buy the house I got here. Originally the idea had been to move all my crap out into storage, renovate and repaint everything before selling it but that never came together and instead it was sold as is. Maybe I could’ve gotten a couple of thousand more for it, but what I got for it was already literally three times what I paid for it, so no point in being greedy.

It has all been stressful but I cannot complain. I now have a house I don’t see myself moving out of ever again, I’m close to where the family is and as a bonus, I can buy new books again without worrying about where to put them.

I’ll miss you Amsterdam Noord

Published on October 19, 2023Leave a comment

Have an already nostalgic trip through the Amsterdam Noord of roughly a decade ago when its hipsterfication was just getting into full swing. Soundtrack by Harry Slinger and friends, one of Amsterdam Noord’s more famous sons.

In 2003 II was still living in student accommodation in Amstelveen, just over the border of Amsterdam. A very nice, cheap flat but too small for two people and when Sandra decided she wanted to move out of England to come live with me, the hunt was on for a bigger, cheap apartment we could rent. What ended up happening was that we semi-legally rented the living space attached to the office of a local political party that shall remain anonymous. This was not sustainable, especially after said party moved their offices into the centre of Amsterdam, away from Noord. Renting a new flat was impossible, so instead we ended up buying the cheapest house we could afford on my shitty salary back then. In 2005 therefore we moved from the west side of Amsterdam Noord, over the canal to the east side, to the Vogelbuurt, just off the Meeuwenlaan.

The new house was ex-social housing, built just after the First World War, intended as housing for the workers of the factories had been established there not long before. When we bought the house, many of these factories and workspaces were still there, just across the road from us. Amsterdam Noord, across the IJ away from the rest of the city, was seen as both not quite Amsterdam and one of its worst parts. Lots of cheap housing, not that much to do and for anything really interesting you have to take the ferry into the city proper. The people living there were a mixture of proper Amsterdammers who had been born and been living there ever since, various generations of migrants looking for cheap housing (and sometimes unofficially banned from other parts of the city) and people like us, only able to afford the housing there even if it wasn’t our first choice.

Eighteen years later and what was once industrial wasteland is now a hipster paradise. There are three different microbrew brewpubs in crawling distance of our house, house prices have literally tripled since we bought ours and Noord is hot. The old Noord is still there, but it is slowly being smothered under the influence of money and bourgeois tastes, gentrified.

I wish I could honestly say that this is the reason I’m moving out, but I’d be lying. The real reason is that having worked from home for the last three years and plan to continue doing so, my parents are not getting any younger and I could really do with a little bit more room in my house. All of which means I will be moving back to my birthplace in less than a month’s time, 500 metres from where my parents still live.

Today I set my signature to sell my house. The end of an era. Eighteen years I’ve lived here in Noord and I will miss it, but not enough to not move away.

Twenty Tracks

Published on August 28, 2023Leave a comment

So Nick Worrall asked:

Make a 20-track comp of your all-time fav tracks, each artist can only feature once. Not the ‘best’ songs, the ones that bring instant joy the second you hear the first note, the ones that give other people the best insight into what stirs your soul. Share when ready.

And why not. To answer it, I looked at the tweny most played songs in my Itunes collection (yes, I still use the iTunes player on PC), though having to skip some songs as I already featured the artist. Looking at the list, you can decide which is more embarassing to feature: dad rock like Elbow or the surprisingly large number of anime songs:

Sollicitere – Janse Bagge Bend
Ikenai Borderline – Walkure
The Party Line – Belle & Sebastian
The Chain – Fleetwood Mac
Rose Tattoo – Dropkick Murphys
One Day Like This – Elbow
Konya wa Hurricane – Kinuko Oomori
When Love Breaks Down – Prefab Sprout
Sinds 1 Dag of 2 – Doe Maar
Schwarz zu Blau – Peter Fox
There’s A Ghost In My House – R. Dean Taylor — Bonus The Fall cover
Welcome To My FanClub’s Night! – Sheryl Nome
Kaerimichi – Katou Emiri
Just Be Good To Me – S.O.S. Band
Temple Of Love (1992) – Sisters of Mercy
Breakdown – Clock DVA
Wasted Years – Iron Maiden
Molotov – Seeed
Christian Woman – Type O Negative
Whole Lotta Love – Led Zeppelin

Married for thirteen years, widowered for twelve

Published on August 24, 2023Leave a comment

Thirteen years ago today I got married:

Martin signs the wedding certificate

Slightly less than twelve years ago, I became a widower.

For reasons I don’t want to make public quite yet, it hard me a bit harder than normal this time. The grieving process is an extended farewell. Part of that farewell is letting go of the physical reminders of your loved one. The food you bought because she liked it, the clothes, perfumes and other things she left behind you cannot use and cannot keep. The little touches here and there in your shared home that were particularly hers. Plans are afoot that will necessarily bring about a loss of most of these reminders as I’m starting a new chapter in my own life. A very positive change, but none the less on a day like this, one that hurts a bit.

This is why I need to move

Published on July 8, 2023Leave a comment

My Librarything collection currently has 8201 books listed. It’s not complete. it’s likely never to be completed as I buy books faster than I enter them. almost a quarter of them are ebooks. Those are not the problem. The problem are the six thousand physical books. Not to brag, but this is what you get for spending four decades reading and buying books: a house filled to bursting with them.

The four bookcases in my bedroom, loaded with manga, bande dessinee and comics

Which means my bedroom now has four of Ikea’s finest Billy bookcases in them. This is where I keep my physical graphic novels, European comics and manga. You may notice that the left most bookcase lacks an extension. For some reason Ikea slightly increased the height which made it just too high for my ceilings to fit a second extension. Really frustrating. Most of the comics here are European, with a lot of American graphic novels and trade paperback or hardcover collections as well. Most of my manga is digital: both cheaper and easier to store. Manga is also much more easier to read on tablet than European or American comics. Partially because they’re mostly in black & white, partially because the panels are bigger. It can be an exercise in frustration to read e.g. some eighties Marvel collection and having to zoom in to read the tiny tiny word balloons.

Part of the bookcases in my living room, fiction and non-fiction

Looking from my kitchen into the living room, only part of the bookcases can be seen. They cover fully three quarters of my wall space. Starting from left next to the kitchen opening, all the way around the room to the back. Only walls not covered is the back wall which looks out at the garden and the bit of wall where my computer desk is. They’re mostly full now, as you may have noticed. You may have also noticed the overflow on the dinner table. The beauty of living alone is that you can use it to store your current reads and nobody will object…. To conserve space my books are sorted by size before genre. Paperbacks by paperbacks, hard covers on top, trades in the bookcases not visible here. Most of my fiction is in paperback, the most convenient format. Non-fiction is a different matter. As for what I read, science fiction/fantasy, crime novels and history are my most read genres. But if you want to really know, read booklog.

Part of the bookcases in my living room, fiction and non-fiction

All of which is not even counting the floppies I also have. The eleven long boxes here are just the biggest part. Several more long boxes and crates are stashed elsewhere in my house, wherever there’s room. I spent roughly a decade and a half, 1987 to 2001 or so buying comics this way and it all adds up. The frustrating thing is that they’re barely accessible anymore because I just don’t have the room to open them.

Which is one of the reasons I’m looking seriously at moving out and back to my home town, where the houses are somewhat cheaper than over here. The other reason to be closer to my family and parents as they’re not getting any younger either. It would be great to find something where I could dedicate an entire room to my comics and not have to stash them in milk crates.