Good life
Herman Sandman
When we bought our house, we received a stack of magazines for free. Old vintages of Living in France and And France, with a single one Italy . I don’t remember where I found them, maybe in the waste paper, but w e put them in a basket on the toilet.
It was almost twenty years ago, at a time when not everyone sat on the toilet with a smartphone in front of their nose. I enjoyed reading the magazines and daydreamed about the pictures of the good life and the houses that were for sale. Often at affordable prices.
Sometimes we bought an additional edition, but nothing went away, so the pile stayed more or less the same and I kept reading the article about the Dutchman who successful wine estate had, but drank soy milk myself and I always lingered at the chateau where the French writer and feminist George Sand lived or stayed. Asking price around 300,000 euros. Bargain.
The magazines gradually disappeared from the toilet, but for some time now there has been a new pile and I am once again daydreaming about photos of a glass of wine on a table under a tree, a traditional cheese maker on a mountain, or a ‘still undiscovered’ coastal town.
But the two titles have long gone together and the photos are from a bygone era. The KNMI pointed out once again this week that summers in the Netherlands are becoming drier, winters wetter, we are getting more heat waves and that will become even worse in the Mediterranean countries.
It’s still fun, such magazines, but they evoke dreams holidays that may never happen again and I look at houses that we will no longer buy at all.