From the Notebook Vol. 6

On the camping. I overheard a conversation between the posh neighbours from across and the guy with the military moustache and his curly wife. They were talking about Monaco. First man said how utterly amazed he was how densely the city was built. He drove into Monaco and saw… wait for it!… he saw an underground roundabout, my oh my!

I didn’t gave it much thought, but now, ruminating those words, I remember I was there myself. I drove my bike through that long, dark, quite scary tunnel and over that underground roundabout into the city. But I couldn’t care less at the time. It didn’t look like anything out of the ordinary to me… as nothing ever did for many years, as I’m now realising. Telephones with which you can make photographs… so? Extrasolar planets… footballers making a million a week… a building 1, 2 or 5 kilometres high… people eating raw horse manure… snowfall on the Acropolis. Nothing.

Literally nothing can astonish me these days. Even if the Amazon would dry up, the IJsselmeer would turn red, people would learn the art of flight, the discovery of extra-terrestrial aliens, or a race of hairy, purple, three-nippled deep-sea people, parallel universes, a way of making gold from base metals, the Fountain of Life or a secret population of unicorns… a talking beetle… okay, maybe some things would strike and excite me. But not a lot!