SERENDIPITY The notorious island of Ibiza in the Balearic Sea was waiting for us so Simon and I took a train from Madrid to Valencia and from there, a boat to the island. The Mediterranean smelt fresh and briny, at the island’s picturesque harbor the docks were busy with merchants and stevedores hustling sacks of…
ADELANTE Simon and I got off the ferry from Tangier in Morocco at Gibraltar but unfortunately didn’t see any of the resident Barbary Macaque old world monkeys…After clearing customs we boarded the train to the stately metropolis of Spain, Madrid. From the glass domed “Atocha” train station a taxi driver brought us to the “Plaza…
After the flight from Athens landed in Casablanca we took a bus to the city of Rabat, the capital of Morocco. From his previous experience in the country, Simon had an acquaintance in Rabat, an older man called Abdullah and when we looked him up at his business in the Medina he insisted we stay…
THE PYTHIAN ORACLE After returning from our Paris trip I was tired of the craziness of the Amsterdam scene so I accepted an invitation from Mr. Aristide Skylitzis, the director of the Greek advertising agency “Greca” to work there for three months. Simon wanted to come along so we soon were on a flight to…
STONED IN THE STREETS The explosion of freedom of expression in the 1960’s by the baby boomers was a reaction to the turbulence of the preceding World Wars and the Great Depression. There was an urgent tendency of this younger generation to explore new forms of music and art enhanced by the expansion of consciousness…
My life had changed drastically…After my mother married Wim Verhoef, I was made to leave my beloved foster family and live with them to attend a new middle school. I moved to a new neighborhood called the Watergraafsmeer at 5 Linnaeusparkweg, a few miles from my previous abode. We occupied the second floor of a…
WAR BABYThe Wheel of Fortune turns in mysterious ways…During 1943 in the middle of World War II, the people in Holland were going through extremely hard times. I was born on November 6 on the Rozengracht in the center of Amsterdam. I can still remember the high whistling sound of falling bombs. After ’45 we…
During my adventures in London during 1966, my ex-partner Simon Posthuma and I had established our selves in a great Georgian style place in St. Stephens Gardens, Bayswater. The house was quite run down and dilapidated but had large rooms. The living quarters were on the ground floor and a spacious studio on the second…