Sunday, July 12
Travel time: 20 minutes
Distance covered: 20km
I had a private cinema screening today. That’s not how it was planned: one of my sons wanted to watch Toy Story 5 and the film was showing at 11am on Sunday. The cinema in Emmen offered a choice of the original English version with subtitles or a dubbed version with Dutch voices. The families with young children all opted for the spoken Dutch version, so my son and I, who wanted to see the original, had an entire auditorium to ourselves. All privilege is accidental if you think about it, but there’s a special kind of joy when it unexpectedly lands on you.
My son is now 23 years old; it’s a galling thought that I was 21 when the first Toy Story film came out. The lead characters are voiced by the same actors, which nobody thinks of as unusual. It continues to amaze me that people blithely assume they will reach milestone anniversaries. Nobody thinks it remarkable that Tom Hanks and Tim Allen are both still alive and able to reprise their roles from 1995. People treat golden weddings and 50-year school reunions as the most natural thing in the world, when I see it as a minor miracle. The transience of life is constantly underestimated.
This was our second day in the Netherlands: tomorrow we cross the borders to Germany and Denmark. It was too warm to do anything strenuous, though I managed to go for a run before the temperature reached 20 degrees. Thanks to the relentless sun and my mother-in-law, my running clothes were washed, dried on the line and ready to pack by the time we came back from the film. Increasingly people are planning their holidays to escape the consequences of global warming, even when they reject the term out of misplaced political conviction. For me, the idea of basking in temperatures in the mid-teens in the middle of July was a powerful incentive to choose Iceland for my holidays this year.
