Memories
Apparently, I’m slowing down: only posting on Saturday what I’ve been doing on Sunday, but so be it.
It being both ‘bevrijdingsdag’, liberation day, and ‘hemelvaart’, Ascension Day, Betsy decided she wanted to do something which referred to today’s specialness. We went to kamp Westerbork, a transitional camp from before and during the second world war. No less then some 100.000 people, mainly jews, were sent from here to destruction camps further east.
In the evening, I had dinner in Utrecht with Arnold and Robert-Jan, both fellow mathematicians, and Jan van Friesland and his girlfriend. Jan van Friesland, author, former editor of the well known Dutch television programme ‘Buitenhof‘ and, like Arnold, crazy about Francesco Carotta, who wrote a most interesting book called ‘Jesus was Caesar
That very book, to which I was alerted last year when working in Zimbabwe, I in turn alerted Arnold to it, who has gone on to become something of a friend of the Carotta family himself.
Not the end
Back in the 80s, still at school, I watched a documentary on TV where it was claimed the world would end on the fifth of May 2005. Clearly, it didn’t.
The reason why it would end was that all planets were going to be aligned on this very day and this event would be heralded by natural disasters all over the planet.
I remember writing that date in one of my schoolbooks, to make sure I would never forget. I didn’t, but, although quite a couple of disasters have occurred over the last couple of months, I don’t think the world ended on this Thursday.