(…) Fever / in the morning / fever all through the night (…)

Not just any fever, but hay-fever and not only in the morning and all through the night, but 24/7. However much I love flowers (ask my wife, she gets them… uhm… once a year?) I really hate it that this spring, for the first time, I have a serious bout of hay-fever. The strange thing is I only seem to have it in France, so maybe this is nature’s way of telling me it is time to move on. And so we’ll do, this summer, to Brussels.

Or does it? Look at the tranquility of the scene above. Wonderful, isn’t it, with the gentle waves rolling onto a mostly deserted stretch of beach at Scheveningen. Then click here. The same beach, the same sunny day and only 50 meters away: a shovel lying in the sand amidst tracks of heavy vehicles, preparing the beach for the onslaught of tourism and a butt-ugly pier in the background. So, yes: a photo never lies… but it doesn’t necessarily tell the whole truth either.

If you weren’t entirely convinced by the previous entry, which I can understand even though it seriously felt like spring, I present you with evidence number two: blooming crocus (croci?) on the Lange Voorhout in the Dutch city of The Hague, where I spent a few days idling around town.

Yes, I know it’s still winter and I do vividly remember March 2005 when I went hunting in Friesland, the north of the Netherlands, and we had a metre of snow and it was freezing close to -20°C. So I know it’s wishful thinking but it sure looked like spring to me and so it did to everyone in Paris today with the sun shining and temperatures reaching almost 15°C. Should the world end tomorrow: today was wonderful. I love spring in Paris.

And it ain’t only the trees, the bees and the birds that think so: from every nook and cranny people are streaming out this weekend to enjoy a spell of warm weather and lie down in a park or on this square in front of the Centre Pompidou, where I discovered for the umpteenth time that I’m no fan of the kind of modern art that consists of three dots of black paint on a white canvas. I’m a barbarian.

Well, just click the image and you’ll know what I mean. I stumbled upon this out of place character in the Jardin du Luxembourg, my favourite park where on sunny days some thirty tables are set aside for playing chess. In the US guys like these play major league basketball. I guess in France they play chess.