30th April 2013 - Amsterdam

Roy and I have just returned from Amsterdam where we invited to the ascension of Dutch King Willem Alexander to the throne recently abdicated by his mother, Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands. Willem, strangely enough named after an Afrikaans rugby player from Warmbaths & rumoured to be the father of Willem Alberts of current Sharks shame, is the first king in over 120 years with his wife, Queen Maxima, named after an old car model manufactured by Datsun in the '70's. The crowd of 25,000 gathered around Dam Square, famous for its potent line of marijuana, to cheer the Dutch Royal family. The throne is largely stripped of political power but still invested with enormous symbolic significance, and the masses, most sporting dreadlocks only Marley would care for, came forward to greet their new king. 

One of the first people to congratulate him was former Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, sporting a new crop of mahogany hair & whose new Bunga Bunga party has started to make serious inroads in the political arena and equally serious inroads into the pool of young girls housed in the Navigli modelling sector of Milan, phoned him from a new nightclub in downtown Brera, & no that's not the same place as our Berea with its equally impressive array of Hindis recently migrated from Stanger, Isipingo, Phoenix & Chatsworth, which areas are rapidly becoming ghost towns now largely populated by all of Nigerians, Angolans, Zimbabweans & various genetic varieties of Portuguese infused Mozambicans, all without any passports & certainly all without any visas to complicate matters. Mandrax, of course, is their drug of choice.

The Dutch Monarch is never crowned, since, in the absence of a state church, there is no cleric to carry out the coronation. The last cleric was seen paddling down the Swanee in 1944 & away from the Germans. The Dutch have to be lauded for this approach as it proves a monarchy based on non-religious lines can be as popular as anywhere else in this twisted world of ours. The Dutch Monarchy has seen rising popularity and this year 78% of the flat landers & windmill specialists voted in favourite of it. On the other hand, monarchies run under religious auspices have seen declining support over recent years and there is a welcome message in that association. One of the devotee's of the King, a bric-a-brac seller on the crowded street, Klas Ovfortyfour, has been pushing sacks of 'primo' ganja imported from the Valley of a Thousand Hills to its visitors for years, and believes that Willem has made it possible for the generations to mingle and that he has united his people. Hence the statue of the former Prince Willem in his Zulu garb & sporting a tan outside the municipal building that divides the former West & Smith streets in downtown Durban. 

Previously, the 46 year old King Willem was a water management specialist & part-time rugby player for the Warsaw municipality, and his attractive other half, Maxima, was an investment banker from Argentina during the Post-Peron juntas & Argentina's subsequent sometime reunion with the capitalist world. How the two eventually met from those diverse locations was down to a European convention in Warsaw over the '82 Falklands conflict with Argentina when their parents acted as intermediaries for Thatcher & the Argentine government. Willem's father acted on Thatcher's behalf from his position as head butler at Downing Street & Maxima's father on Argentina's behalf, her father having emigrated to Argentina in July '45 to resume his research on identical twins. The two were found in a firm embrace during one of the convention tea-breaks behind a statue dedicated to the free 'Falkland POW's' campaign launched by the then underground Nazi party from their base at Northlands Private Girls' School chapel rectory in Buenos Aires in a poignant homage to the atrocities perpetuated by German policies during the last World War. No-one has managed to prize them apart since, it appears. The Northlands rectory still has various traditional rites attributed to the current school choir's recital of 'Save Jeruslaem, Our Land!' that continues to form part of Netanyahu's foreign policy rhetoric & stubborn refusal to resolve the tribulations & conflict along the Gaza Strip. 'I blame this conflict on the Germans!' is his fond riposte to any European cajoling at a final resolution.