Last weekend I was drunk in a bar in Bergen op Zoom. We celebrate Lent there these days. Next to me stood a man, clearly not from Bergen and clearly also drunk. “What a wonderful party this is,” he said, “we don’t have anything like this in the Randstad.” I responded with two lines from the Bergen poet Bert Bevers: “You don’t have to be born here to want to come from here.” He: “How beautiful. I’ll look for that tomorrow.” I read along while he makes a note on his phone: “you don’t think you want to cope here”.
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