Amsterdam, Peanut butter, Mayonnaise and other curiosities.

So, we had arrived in Amsterdam, a city which my mother knew reasonably well, and loved, and through which I had passed a number of times during my Rock and Roll roadie life, notably with a strangely chaotic concert in the concertgebouw with Traffic the previous year.

As I mentioned in the last post, we were tied up in the yacht habour Sixhaven, which was pleasant, safe and not too expensive for us.

We were tied up next to a small yacht belonging to an American architect who was sailing vaguely around Europe with no fixed plans or intentions. This guy, Tim Killiam by name, was a really pleasant man, and who was fated to be the catalyst to my next major career move, that of becoming a model maker, more about that and him anon.

Obviously our first priority was to find work, as we didn't have that much money to live on. It was not immediately apparent how we might go about finding work, as neither of us spoke dutch – obviously – nor really knew enough about the place to know where to find work that would produce enough money for us to live reasonable on.

Somehow Lotty managed to find work as a proof reader at Elsevier Scientific publishers, and I located good old Manpower and was awarded a temporary job at a sort of food factory on the edge of Amsterdam, called Lyucks.

This had to be up there with one of my worst jobs, akin to when many years earlier I had found myself a holiday job in a sweet factory in which I was moved from job to job as I simply hated each one and was thus not much use at it.... separating chocolate biscuits as they came past on a production line, making 40 tons of fudge in huge cement mixers, helping the chocolate maker until I inadvertently put my foot in a bucket of boiling water and similar disasters.

Well at Luycks factory, I was first placed on a production line with the job of slapping labels on jars of peanut butter, which was when I discovered that the labels on such products are meaningless.... We placed labels for the most expensive make of peanut butter on the first run of jars, and then without a pause in the productions we were given different labels, and the peanut butter came along in different pots, but the contents were exactly the same..... In other words, that factory made peanut butter for its own label, but also for almost all the other makes of peanut butter on sale in the Netherlands... The prices were wildly different, but the peanut butter was exactly the same.. And I discovered that this applied to all the other products of this factory...

By the way, I know the product was the same, as I knew the guys who worked in the peanut, mayonnaise and other products kitchens there...

Saved me a lot of money for the rest of my life, as I gather this practice is wide spread in the food industry.

Later they put me on a small machine that squirted mayonnaise into tubes, rather like oversize toothpaste tubes.

This entailed me sitting on a tall stool in front of this squirting machine, with a large cardboard box full of empty tubes on one side, and another box on my other side into which I dropped the filled tubes.

The tubes were open at the bottom, so the idea was I held the tubes upside down under the nozzle of the squirt machine, it would then squirt a measured amount of mayonnaise into the tube, I then transferred the tube to a second machine in front of me, which rolled the bottom of the tube up, and then I dropped the tube in the second box, and grabbed another empty tube and went through the whole process again.. and so on, all day long. Would have been alright, except the machine squirted automatically every so many seconds, so I had to race to keep up with it... And didn’t always succeed, so quite a few tubes went off to the shops half full, the other half smeared on the outside of the tubes.... no one there seemed to care about this, so nor did I.

A number of my fellow workers who were what is now called backpackers used this machine to put marijuana into the tubes in order to smuggle it into England when they left..... No idea if that worked or not. Their logic was that it isn’t possible to roll up the bottom of those tubes as the machine did, so the tubes would look like normal unused tubes of mayonnaise.... Perhaps it worked..

I survived this for a while, and then Lotty managed to get me work at the department of Elsevier where all the scientific journals were put into envelopes and sent off to the people who had subscription to them all over the world. This was much more relaxed and fun too, and my fellow workers were much more congenial to me than both the full time and part time workers at that dreadful Luycks factory.

In my more relaxed moments there I took to writing notes to whoever was getting the journals, remarks about the particular journal I was sending them. Generally friendly notes, but on occasion if I saw an article that interested me, or annoyed me, I would comment on that article, sometimes at considerable length.... God only knows what the recipients made of those odd notes.. .I never heard of any reactions to this simple amusement of mine.

This went on for some time, with both Lotty and I being reasonably happy with our lives, as at that point we planned to go on with our Great Trip the following year, so were not planning to stay put in Amsterdam for longer.

However, as sometimes happens, our plans were sabotaged by Lotty becoming pregnant, which rather changed things. And this got more complex when that pregnancy went wrong, and we lost that child.

Shortly thereafter, she was pregnant again, but once again it went wrong.

And then a third crack at that whip, which did produce a child.. Jake our son was born at the onze lieve vrouwe gasthuis in Amsterdam East. But he was born with a glandular problem, which entailed him spending time in the intensive care unit for a while, and we were told he would need medication for the rest of his life... So we decided that our plans to sail around the world had to be canceled. And settled down to make our lives in Amsterdam with Jake.

And this will begin in the next installment of this tale.