Arie Boomsma is a man who does not like to be answered. He was not lucky last night with his fellow guest at Boerderij Van Dorst: Midas Dekkers. “An ice bath? Bad!”
For many people, it is exactly what makes Arie Boomsma so irritating: pretending that he has all the wisdom, especially in the field of health. Arie sleeps with tape on his mouth, Arie swims through the ditches of Abcoude, Arie sits in an ice bath, Arie this, Arie that. And according to him, the rest is all crazy.
Big steps
Arie is also very concerned about the world, he says. The dumbbell minister is ‘terribly concerned’ about this, but what does he do about it? “Small steps. Recycling, little things, small steps.”
Absolute nonsense, Midas Dekkers countered last night as his fellow guest Farm Van Dorst. “If you have a big problem, I wouldn’t take small steps. If you have a big problem, I would take big steps.”
What are those big steps? Stop pre-planting. Something Arie is not very good at, so to speak.
‘Shame on you!’
Arie has no fewer than three children and that is the problem, according to Midas. “What if we get to the point where, when a baby is born, we don’t go there with congratulations and cakes, but people close their curtains in some shame: nothing happened here! Then we would be a big step further.”
According to him, there are far too many people on the planet. “I now read in the newspaper that there are too few houses. There are not too few houses. There are too many people. The only thing I can advise the young generation is: don’t create another generation.”
Ice baths
On to the next point of contention: Arie taking ice baths. It’s healthy, says Arie. “Yes delicious. Cold causes you to produce some brown fat. That helps you with your metabolism and your temperature management.”
Even nonsense, says Midas. “The human body is not designed to sit in an ice bath. Man originated in the tropics. We originated in Africa, so the thought that we would have to go out into the cold… We are not made for that.”
Arie, the man who thinks that every problem can be solved with a dumbbell, then: “You should tell that story to Scandinavians.”
Midas: “Well, it’s not for nothing that it’s very sparsely populated there.”
30 percent
Then Midas also starts to resist Arie’s fitness hobby. “Most people think that those muscles are getting bigger and stronger and thicker. But the truth is that no matter how you train, your muscle will never become more than a third bigger than it was. In other words: you start out as a loser who starts training and you end up as a trained loser.”
Arie irritated: “Yes, nice. As a joke.”
Midas: “Man is not built to hang on all kinds of strange devices.”
Simple Arie
When Raven van Dorst asks at the end whether Midas can learn something from Arie, he says: “Wow. Ehhh… Well, I think it would be nice to be so optimistic. It’s a bit simple… Yes, simple people are often very cheerful.”
Arie laughs on the outside, but turns red on the inside. “I obviously can’t agree with that. (…) Do you know what I wonder? So if you look at the world more cynically or grumblingly, what is the reason to tackle it every day?”
The answer? That does not matter. This was just a joke, but with a question mark behind it.