Rain drums on the cloth of the too-small tent in which Heidi, Moos the German shepherd, and I bivouac near of Groningen, a city in the north of the Netherlands, since the beginning of January. Gusts of wind relentlessly make the tent twist and buckle, but time and again, its two flexible, curved poles wrestle it back into its original igloo shape. Moos doesn’t like the twisting and buckling of our shelter, although she seems at ease with it now, her gaze fixed on Heidi, who is sitting cross-legged behind a gas stove on which she is heating spinach. Through that spinach, I know, she’ll mix raisins and the smoked salmon she slices on a wooden board, that smoked salmon the real reason for Moos to be momentarily at ease with that twisting and buckling of our shelter.
My laptop on my raised thighs, I lie on my back on my sleeping bag, which is the only position in which I can work in this tent, the cursor on the screen on the send button under an e-mail I just drafted, my index finger over the left button of the mouse on my stomach.
‘I eh ... I’ll end our tenancy in England right now, okay?’ I say loud enough to be heard over the drumming of the rain and the snoring of the gas stove.
‘What...?’ Heidi asks.
‘Our tenancy in England. I’ll end it now. Okay?’
‘Sure ...’
‘Sure what ...?’
‘That about our tenancy.’
‘What about our tenancy?’
‘That what you just said about it. I did hear what you said.’
‘Then, what did I say?’
‘Well, that about our tenancy.’
Click.
‘In a month’s time, we’re homeless.’
‘What ...?’
‘Quite some wind.’
‘You didn’t say that ...’
Despite the irritation I always feel when Heidi upgrades her not being able to do two things at once to a form of art, like, say, slicing salmon and listening, my relief is massive. Man, there’s little that feels better than to throw away old shoes before having acquired new ones, and a sense of excitement takes hold of me as I realize that we will soon be leaving England for good – having arrived there only a year ago in a self-built caravan, officially homeless like we’ll be again this time next month.
It looked slick, our self-built caravan, but in building caravans, Heidi and I discovered when we put our caravan to use, we lack proficiency. Parts of our Sibley tent, with which we traveled before our caravan experiment, we used to create our caravan’s pop-up roof, and after we found a house in England and sold our caravan to a trailer salesman who faked not to realize that the caravan’s chassis was brand new, we no longer had any means to travel. No problem. Building furniture for our new house, whose walls and floors are so out of true that no existing piece of furniture fits, kept us busy. In addition, I finished my latest book, The Caveman Code, a book on health, and then corrected the print proofs the publisher sent me.
At least once in her life, Heidi wanted to experience an English Christmas. Staring at the cloth of our twisting and buckling tent, I realize that was about the only reason that made us cross the English Channel when, early 2022, we fled the vaccination mandates in Austria, where we lived back then – although being Dutch. Sure, the UK makes no part of the EU, which, last year, still felt relatively safe. That aside, all covid measures in the UK had been set aside in the summer of 2021, which gave hope. As I mulled over safer and more hopeful options, Heidi booked our crossing of the English Channel from Hoek van Holland, in the Netherlands, to Harwich.
Apart from building furniture for the house into which we moved despite the housing shortage in England – and could only move into because most sane people realize that even out of true is bound by limits – we visited castles and other landmarks near our house, hiked and canoed in the Essex Marshes, biked through the rolling countryside around our house, and made use of the local gym. A beautiful spring, a pleasantly cool summer, snow in November, and I eh... I felt like an elderly man. Long nights, I pondered on what is wrong with England until I concluded there to be nothing wrong with England except living there. Until Christmas, I would keep quiet about what I concluded.
The week before Christmas, as I visited the podcasts in the Netherlands to which I had been invited after the release of The Caveman Code, Heidi decorated our English house, and on Christmas Eve, upon my return from the Netherlands, walking into our yard, I was greeted by mini lights in mini Christmas trees from behind windows that were, with red tape, divided into compartments, spray snow in a corner of each compartment. A Christmas wreath on the front door and inside the house, where a fire burned in the fireplace, a decorated Christmas tree. Burning candles in Christmas arrangements. The smell of spruce mixed with that of the bay leaf in the coq au vin on the stove in the kitchen.
After Moos had calmed down and after the coq au vin had reclaimed Heidi’s attention, I thumbtacked two colored socks to a beam above the fireplace, in those socks the few presents I had almost forgotten to buy in the Netherlands. Coq au vin and other copious Christmas meals without potatoes, beans, and grains, The Holiday and Love Actually on television, walks through our Christmas-lit village, and coffee in Christmas-decorated pubs. The day after Christmas we took stock …
The United Kingdom! Not Brexit brought it to its knees – none of the British we met unhappy with Brexit – but its government’s determination to contribute to the establishment of a non-democratically elected world order and wokism – that emotion-based movement carried by all right people unwilling to act all right themselves – brought it to its knees. Stoically, the British accept the poverty the people behind that non-democratically elected world order bestow on them, and equally stoically, they accept the existential emptiness forced upon them by wokies, today’s Brownshirts, physically unimpressive but internet-powerful.
Stoicism or just resignation? Whatever it is, it was admirable when German missiles wreaked havoc on London during World War II. It eh… it so much feels like the opposite of admirable now that it dampened Heidi’s and my enthusiasm to rebuild our lives in the UK. Without conclusively having decided on our future, we arrived in the Netherlands just after the start of 2023, where we also arrived without the new tent we’d found after a long search on the internet. Heidi had assumed that I had ordered that tent, and I … whatever. Heidi had already booked our crossing of the English Channel from Harwich to Hoek van Holland, I overestimated Royal Mail’s efficacy, and now our new tent is likely waiting for us in a rain-wrecked carton box on the doorstep of our soon to be ex-house in England while we laugh, work, cook, eat, and sleep in an old, too-small tent that survived a year in a damp cellar in England. A little less haste and we would have traveled with our new tent, but haste was of essence because Heidi and I had discovered that we lack as much proficiency in making video’s as we do in building caravans.
In The Caveman Code, I announce that Heidi and I made a series of videos in which I demonstrate how easy it is to cook like a modern caveman. None of those videos, which we shot while still living in Austria, turned out to be suitable for publication. Since our arrival in the Netherlands, we are building a professional studio, and ... a scream from Heidi, who, I realize immediately, was taken off guard by a gust of wind that pushed the cloth of our tent so far inward that it almost touched the fire under the pan with spinach, raisins, and smoked salmon. We laugh, comfort Moos, and I allow my thoughts to wander from a nearly burning tent to East Palestine, in Ohio in the United States, where for days now, the cargo is burning in the cars of a derailed train, and where an unparalleled environmental disaster consequently unfolds.
The mainstream media pay no attention to that environmental disaster. Remarkable! Since March 2020, those mainstream media have been highlighting whichever piece of news that diverts our attention from truths regarding covid, regarding the vaccinations against it, and regarding the establishment of that non-democratically elected world order. What then, is the question that arises from the boycott on news from East Palestine, is going on in East Palestine? Experts, via the increasingly professional alternative media, leave no doubt as to what in East Palestine literally and figuratively stinks, but countless questions remain unanswered. Why did the local authorities decide to controlled – albeit uncontrolled – burn the chemicals in the cars of a derailed train without any ado whatsoever and without consulting experts? How large is the area in which the chemical fallout from the fire in East Palestine will precipitate? Is it true that snow in Canada is already contaminated with dioxin?
Snow! From East Palestine my thoughts jump to Davos, where some two weeks ago, the WEF – an inclusive think tank that unites mostly white people – held its annual meeting. Cooperation in a fragmented world was the motto of that meeting, and no one dared adding that it’s the efforts of the people gathered in Davos that fragment the world. The Bill Gates method: create a problem for which the costly solution has already been developed. We meet in a time of crisis, Klaus Schwab preached at the start of that last WEF meeting. What he further preached is frightening, but quoting Klaus Schwab is risky, because anyone who quotes Klaus Schwab – or quotes, say, Bill Gates or Yuval Noah Harari – is guilty of spreading conspiracy theories, which leads me to a new definition of the word conspiracy theory. A conspiracy theory, according to that definition, is a relatively easily ascertained, often limitedly exhibited truth that must remain hidden from the bulk of humanity for some time to come.
‘Hm ...’ I hear myself thinking out loud.
‘What ...?’ Heidi asks.
‘Nothing,’ I murmur, and as I try to shoot holes in the definition I just dreamed up, I think of actor Woody Harrelson, who recently remarked: We live in a corrupted world where every government is just a bunch of business men working for a bigger bunch of business men, and none of them give a fuck about the people. The sad fact is no one knows how to change it because no one knows how to take on the corporations. That eh... that ties in with Julian Assange’s observation that governments are nothing but organisations that turn private money into corporate money, and I realize that it takes no more than a few transactions until private money ends up in a BlackRock, Vanguard, or Berkshire Hathaway bank account. Those conglomerates, backed by us having let go the gold standard, some fifty years ago, and backed by our governments’ recent anxiousness to generate fiat money, then acquire from source to retail what we need to live, such as food, clothing, and energy, acquire the mainstream media and thus our opinion, acquire the arms industry, acquire our health care and everything related to it, acquire our homes, acquire control of our lives, and ... man, what a fascinating conspiracy theory!
While Heidi scoops spinach with raisins and smoked salmon on two plates, I wrestle myself into a sitting position. I close my laptop, place it on my sleeping bag, and thankfully take the plate Heidi hands me. Heidi says, ‘Enjoy,’ and as the wind pushes the cloth of our tent against my shoulder, giving Moos yet another scare, I say, ‘Cheers ...’
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