Many months ago someone said to me; "In London the sun seems to set almost an hour early compared to the Netherlands!" And I must confess to my ignorance; this remark puzzled me.
My first response was outright denial. Afterall, London may be slightly more to the south than most of the Netherlands but not so much that you would expect a major impact on the timing of sunset. And even if there would be an impact, then it would mean increased daylight rather than reduced daylight hours. It was not until I realised how artificial the time-zone divide between the UK and the Netherlands is that something dawned on me. The true time-difference between, say, London and Utrecht is merely a number of minutes. But the fact that we are in different timezones creates an unnatural 1-hour difference. As a result the sun seems to set from London and from Utrecht at roughly the same moment in "universal time" and thus seems to set in London an hour early. At sunrise ofcourse the opposite holds.
Almost a year earlier somebody had told me that there are more flights connecting Amsterdam to London than trains connecting Utrecht to Amsterdam. Now it depends a bit on the time of the day whether this is just about true, or boldly understated. But generally it is quite amazing that indeed you can fly between Amsterdam and London 6 to 8 times an hour. Not only that; flying time is 45 minutes to London Stansted and the train connections to and from the airports cost about as much as the flight itself. For all practical purposes, we could be talking about two cities in a single country with a bridgeless canal running through it.
Ever since I moved to London, and mind you London is not England, the similarities have never stopped striking me. Watching premier league summaries in the evening is a dance from van der Vaart highs to Kuit lows. My local supermarket sells Edammer and Gouda cheese and friggin' stroopwafels. Black liquorice is undeniably just sweet soft "drop" and "hagelslag" does exist here but you're expected to use it a cake-decoration. But who would care about that?
But it also became increasingly easy to spot the differences. No "patatje oorlog" for starters, "Patat" is chips and "chips" is crisps. But there is more. The general attitude is one of "give it your best shot, mate". People seem to be looking for potentialities and options rather than for problems. It is an optimism that seemingly comes along with surviving the 1940 Blitz while cracking down under 2 inches of snow during the "Big Freeze" of christmas 2010, when temperatures in the hart of the city plummetted all the way down to -2 celcius ... the BBC spoke of "arctic conditions". And as you go about your business in the streets between Bloomsbury and Holborn, between Westminster and Kensington, between Camden and Dulwich you're constantly called "dear" or "luv" ... which after a while actually makes you feel better.
And ofcourse there is no Geert Wilders screaming in your ear that everyone with two passports is generically suspect, that the End of the West is near and assorted irrationalities about his favorite religious group. The UK has its own contingent of racist blockheads in the form of the BNP, but not only are they not in parlaiment, they also lost in most of their districts during the last elections. They have no impact whatsoever on the general atmosphere in town. An atmosphere that is set by that weird blend of winter-hardenned "transport-for-london" clumsiness, appreciation of diversity, general optimism about anything including the english national squad and the chances to win (cricket) the Ashes against the Ozzies, lamentation about the city's bankers greed and the sure knowledge that Tottenham fans will never fully integrate into London culture. And the first thing that my youngest daughter had at school as a subject in her "citizenship" course was: European Integration.
It is not all good here and England, and London in particular, has its share of problems. Ofcourse there is inner city crime, there are appalling examples of poverty, there are people living to close to Luton who fill their backpacks with the wrong kinds of stuff when they go to Sweden or to central London. There are billions of pounds of planned budget cuts, the minimum wages are too minimal, and there's yesterday's nasty VAT rise. And yet at its schools and universities, in its streets and shops, in the parks and along the river there is this sense of confidence that somehow we will all make it through the hard times. We'll have a Katie & William party to look forward to in april of 2011 although we'll probably have a tube-strike that same day. We've got the Games coming up in 2012 while we don't know how to staff the Metropolitan police by then, and as we discuss how imminent the next terrorist attack is we passionately engage in a conversation about whether the "free" blue Boris Bicycles sponsored by Barclays should come equipped with helmets.
When I was searching for a post-doc in 1996 after completing my PhD in Germany the possibillities looked very bleak across the board. My PhD-supervisor Joerg Huefner told me that "crises are always also times for renewal and trying out new possibillities". Back in 1996 I thought that was so easy for him to say ... but I took my chances, signed up for the IVLOS teacher training programme in Utrecht and thoroughly enjoyed the optimistic atmosphere that I found at this university that was embarking on new things; like the Julius School in the Physics & Astronomy department, like University College Utrecht. I spent 14 good years in Utrecht at UU as well as UCU. Now fifteen years later I am still surprised by how right my PhD-supervisor has been and how seductively easy it is to only count your losses. This is not the time to play it safe ... for a university this is the time to change and invest in its people, for students and staff it is a time to invest in themselves.