Ah, you’ve got to love the Dutch. Having long cast itself as The Fonz in the
Happy Days café of Europe, the Netherlands is now outdoing itself in examples of chilled thinking. First they opened a library where you could “borrow” people — a gay, a Muslim, a paraplegic — and take them to a café for a chat to find out more about their lives. It was an eminently Dutch notion.
If that idea had occurred to America (played by Chachi), of course, you would have had instead to buy the people — all of whom would have to be very beautiful — on credit, move them into your condo, and embark on the journey of a lifetime where the magic is real.
The Dutch have now turned their laid-back gaze to another vexed area of modern society: the problem of teenagers loitering on street corners. Or youts ’angin’, as my young brother informs me is the correct terminology for the activity. In the UK we have a simple approach to this problem: we tolerate it with great fear, interspersed with relief and sly triumph when it rains. There is nothing like watching a snippy tyke in trainers constructed wholly of porous white Chinese nylon trying to negotiate a large brown puddle.
Charlois council in Rotterdam, on the other hand, has decided to amuse itself by embracing a lateral and wholly silly solution. Now, whenever youts begin dey ’angin’ in the Zuidplein underground station, a hastily erected PA blasts out Dutch carols, rendered on a barrel-organ, until the youts disperse. A council spokesman says the teenagers usually leave “within a matter of minutes”. And indeed, anyone who’s been on the It’s A Small World After All ride at Disneyland will concur wholeheartedly with their decision. The barrel-organ is a curious instrument: while the violin, the piccolo, even the tuba are relatively flexible appliances, facilitating a wide range of tone and emotion, the only atmosphere a barrel-organ can ever conjure is that of a brassy Victorian prostitute being murdered at a fair. No wonder the teenagers dispersed immediately: the kind of person with the psychological make-up to covet, buy and operate a barrel-organ must have been near by, and that is not a comfortable prospect.
Of course, while we do not know where the organ-chastened teenagers of Rotterdam disappeared to — they could have run off to buy barrel-organs, to use in the next bout of inter-yout gang warfare — the Dutch do raise some interesting questions about how best to deal with our aimless young. There’s no doubt that gangs of kids, coagulating on patches of even ground, carry with them an aura of menace — partly for their own protection, and partly because once one has learnt to be menacing, around the age of 13, one wants to practise it as often as possible as an important repertoire step-up from sulking.
Obviously if we were being wholly logical we should be cheered rather than cowed by these urchins. Until recently, people of their age would either be off fighting a war or dropping dead of pleurisy in a Cornish tin mine, their faces too contorted by malnutrition and interminable folk ballads for their mothers to tell one corpse from another. Aimless youths are a sign of our nation’s peace and affluence.
But if we do wish to move this joyous sight to somewhere other than equidistant from our house and the corner shop, maybe we should consider out-Dutching the Dutch. They were liberal enough to employ a hurdy-gurdy pumping out God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen to get the kids off the streets. We could use similar psychology, ja, to stop them ever going on the streets in the first place.
After all, we are dealing with people who are already standing around on street corners in inclement weather, poorly dressed, sharing a single cigarette among up to ten others and shouting incomprehensibly at each other: they’re only one step up from the homeless. And as “homeless” is the third-biggest insult teenagers can deploy at each other (after “gay lesbian” and “Bosnian”) there is room for great psychological leverage here. Instead of regarding these dawdling pubescents with fear, we should look on them with pity. Remind them that they can get a free haircut and blanket on Christmas Day from the Salvation Army. Tell them St Mungo’s is a unique hostel that allows clients to bring their pets, then gesture at one of their uglier friends and say: “You can bring your monkey, sonny” in a comforting voice. Throw them 50p for soup. Once the ’angin’ youts feel that standing around makes them look not like edgy outlaws who laugh in the face of domesticity, but losers with very cold toes, they might just go home.
Oh, please, don't make me laugh
The Times reports that smoking in Hollywood movies has rocketed in the past few years. University of California researchers found that while the number of smokers in the US had halved since the 1950s, the number of “smoking events” per hour had gone up from 10.7 to 10.9. While that clearly consists in real terms of just one drag on a Benny while someone walks out the door, the researchers claim that on-screen smoking causes 390,000 teenagers a year to try their first cigarette.
Obviously this is all important stuff, blah blah blah, don’t smoke, kids. What worries me, however, is that no research at all is being carried out into levels of facile wisecracking in Hollywood movies since the 1950s. It used to be that only one or two people in a film — the slightly plainer friends of the romantic leads, or the baddies — would make with the funnies. By the Eighties, this extended to the leads themselves. In the Nineties, The Terminator started wisecracking. Now everyone does it — mums, shopkeepers, mortuary attendants, kids, aliens, animals voiced by actors too fat to appear on screen themselves. These days, so many gags have to be fitted into a movie that there’s no time for a plot, character development, sweeping cinematography across embattled Wild Western towns or dance routines involving a whimsical waltz with a mop.
A bit of all right
David Cameron's a bit fanciable, isn't he? I mean, relative to Tory leaders. I can imagine choosing the “shag” option in a game of Shag or Die featuring him — so long as the “die” option wasn’t “die in 60 years, during a Love Party in your gigantic wine cellar”, obviously. Are we allowed to say that yet? Have I just disappeared from dozens of Christmas card lists?
www.timesonline.co.uk/caitlinmoran
