I was twenty-one years old and travelling back from Israel, where I had stayed on a kibbutz. I had been out there for four months, mostly working on the banana plantations. I had found myself a girlfriend there (or maybe she found me) and now I stopped off and stayed with her in her home town, Rotterdam. She had left Israel a couple of weeks before me and was now living at home with her parents and working in a baker’s shop. She wasn’t really my kind of girlfriend, Rotterdam wasn’t my kind of town, and I don’t think her parents liked me. I was there for two weeks I think and I had to amuse myself while she was at work. Don’t bore yourself, her little sister said; making the verb reflexive and putting the responsibility on me.
I tried not to bore myself. I borrowed a bicycle, explored the town and some local countryside, and fell off three times. Once when the wheel slipped in between the tram lines. Then again when a sudden gust of wind came out through a gap in the buildings and caught me unaware. And then I forgot that you had to back pedal to brake and tumbled off the edge of a dyke.
It was late September and the beginning of autumn. I loved the feel of the westerly wind on my face.