Issue1 TasteBound compressed - Flipbook - Page 12
IN FOCUS
‘In Zeeland,
particularly
elaborate
bonnets
feature up to
800 finely
pressed
pleats’
1,000 other human qualities, and then lug huge analogue
equipment to the most remote places, saying, ‘I’m here
to paint you; I’m here to see you and I’ve only got one
opportunity,’ it’s a very, very different transaction.
his story starts at the beginning of the
pandemic. I’d just come back to the
Netherlands from a trip to Mongolia and it
was, as we say in Dutch,
an ‘adult lockdown’, which was different
from most other countries because Holland
is very free. You are left to your own
interpretation, to make an adult decision. I always say that in
10
TA S T E B O U N D
the Netherlands, when there’s a problem, we don’t close the
curtains because we don’t have any. We
sit in the window in our knickers smoking a joint, saying,
‘This is life, come and get it.’ In the UK, when there’s a
problem, we draw these heavy old curtains, we have cups of
tea, we talk about the weather.
So I was here, with very few flights available. A number of
people said, ‘If anybody’s going to suffer from the lockdown,
you are, Jimmy, because you have to escape the whole time.’
Only I was at a place in life where I was beginning to realise
what I’d been running away from, and that there wasn’t
perhaps any need for that any more. I was feeling peaceful.
One day I was going through my emails – which I’m
