Amsterdam diary notes
Parenting reflections, porcelain seeds and the name for a group of flamingos
My children growing up and leaving for university was one key catalyst for DeuxPies as it left me with more time for concocting. My eldest graduated last week and I went to Amsterdam to be part of it. Here she is saying goodbye.
I was able to take some cherry bitters from the cherry trees from her childhood home to her. It was the first batch from eight weeks ago which I bottled this week.
“They’re from our cherry trees!” I offered her as part of a whole reset gut biome health pack I was dying to present her with that I have encouraged my family at home to do. It’s a week of probiotics every second day, then the next week every day, with prebiotics to follow along with the digestive support from the bitters. The testing phase of this batch of bitters includes watching the reactions from friends and family tasting and smelling it and encouraging honesty. It’s giving me confidence that I have perfected the recipe (but not yet the labels). Apparently the tincture smells divinely like cherries, which is a good start.
I am going to segue into a story about when my graduated daughter was around 7 years old. At this time, circa 2010, we visited the artist Ai Wei Wei’s Sunflower Seeds exhibition at the Tate Modern in London. There were an estimated 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds, 1/3 of an acre, laid out over the floor of the Turbine Hall. My daughter was enamoured by the seeds and I could see her wanting to reach and take some. I stood there with a moral dilemma. Do I let her grab a handful in the hope that I can get a few myself, as I had this deep yearning to own one of my own. My child innocently plucking even one seed from the 10 tonnes spread of these beautifully hand-crafted porcelain objects surely would not count as stealing.
We went home empty handed.
I have a gift for her. A handful of Ai Wei Wei porcelain sunflower seeds I found online for keeps as part of the graduation celebration.
She has since grown into an incredible young woman with a good mix of strength and kindness, a strong and wise spirit and I am proud to say we have gifted the world with a wonderful soul. The core goal of being a parent is to rear children who are better than yourself. To raise them above your head and release them to the world as a gift. So far I am confident I have succeeded on two accounts.
While we were in Amsterdam together, being in a new city naturally fired my olfactory senses which often involved changing weather. A slight fohn wind would come ahead as a warning that a rain was coming, confirmed by a dark grey cloud, which then blew in, whipped up a snake and pelted some bullets at me only to pass and leave behind an indeterminable scent of steam rising from a pavement.
The scent of petrichor mixed with the saltiness of the North Sea would come and go throughout the days there.
We went to the outdoor market and the asphalt mixed with the scent of hot roasted nuts from a street vendor stays with me. The vintage and charity shops in Amsterdam are so much fun to visit. DeuxPies is about treasuring that which is right with us now, not needing to make more.
I found a late 1800 French porcelain pot in an Amsterdam charity shop that has now come back with me to France. It was made by Roger & Gallet who at the time exported widely from France, and this refillable shaving cream pot would have been found on fine dressing tables across Europe and as far as the US.
We weaved around the water lands on bikes to the warm scent of cow manure and the cooler scents of the canal. It was always threaded with that wet tarmac accord. It wound through another long day of beating city pavements and finding details that I noticed by the grace of an eye being new in a city before the adjustments become normalised.
You can see I passed some flamingos in the city and in writing this I have learned that a group of flamingos is called a flamboyance. On return to France my youngest daughter had bought welcome home flowers with her first holiday pay check along with some other incredible gestures. It blows me away that these creatures that were born and raised now independently do things like this of their own accord. I used to dream of sea monkeys. Children are above and beyond.
But the rewards of parenting are like love, sleep and lost things. The rewards show up if you stop looking. And if you are reading this with young children, and I say this to my sister too, every single bit of effort you put in will not necessarily be a reward for you. It will become peace for you in later life. But it will be your gift to the world.