Category Archives: Life in NL

Poetry Worth Hearing

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Many thanks to Kathleen Mcphilemy for including three of my poems in episode 37 of Poetry Worth Hearing or you can listen on Youtube, Audible and Spotify.

One of the poems is his ashes on a corner.


The theme was hiding and/or seeking. The episode is 60 minutes. The first half hour or so is an interesting interview with poet Nancy Campbell who talks about her residency on Greenland among other things. The interview and Nancy’s poems bookend poems by Guy Jones, Zelda Cahill-Patten, Lesley Saunders, Pat Winslow, Richard Lister, Dinah Livingstone, and Sarah Mnatzaganian.


The theme for the next episode is all things ‘eco’. Send up to four minutes of unpublished poems (text and sound file) plus a short biography to poetryworthhearing@gmail.com by 18 January 2026. Find more information on poetryworthhearing.biz.

his ashes on a corner

of the dining table
by the small square
votive container
the discreet
undertaker’s logo

she greets him
will have a glass
at six his ashes
waiting with us
for borders to open

Filling the well…

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A war memorial

Health issues have kept me housebound, but I was determined to go and see this artwork at Museum Beelden aan Zee, Scheveningen before it goes back to Marseille. A sunny, breezy autumn day, a salty tang, quiet beach.

Khaled Dawwa (Maysaf, 1985) worked on it during 2018 – 2022. He was invited to show it at Beelden aan Zee in 2025 – when here in The Netherlands we celebrate 80 years of freedom.

Voici mon coeur!

The work (tr. Here is my heart!) is a 6 m long model. It’s made of vulnerable, unbaked clay. It represents a fictional street in Damascus. Outside, there are the remains of a car, benches, a swing seat. We see material damage. The setting is nighttime.

It was a disorienting experience walking into the small side gallery as it was almost dark. A volunteer gives visitors a small torch, so we can walk around and shine into the rooms: beds, tables, chairs, a poster on the wall, a book left on the table.

Dawwa and his family fled Syria shortly after the start of the civil war. After a year in Lebanon, they travelled to France where they now live in exile. Khaled now works in a studio just outside Paris.

Before leaving he took photos of the works he had made, then destroyed them – for security reasons, or because they were too large to travel.

Voici mon coeur!, a contemporary war memorial, is a personal and emotional representation, in contrast with the collective memory expressed by traditional war memorials. A powerful and timely reminder. I found it deeply moving.

Links: https://www.beeldenaanzee.nl/tentoonstellingen/khaled-dawwa

https://www.facebook.com/share/15fJ6dg7Eq/ On this page you can find details of other works by Khaled Dawwa.

Veteran trees

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Poplar tree, 110-year-old.

Today I am voting twice: first for a political party, then for a tree.

In a busy city, there is little room for trees to become old. On average, a city tree lives for 50 years.

The Hague doesn’t have many old trees: during WWII a lot were cut down, their wood used for cooking and heating. Of the 120,000 city trees, only around 1300 have the ‘monumental’ tree status.

Such trees are over 50 years old and meet at least one of these criteria: it is irreplaceable, of rare type, shape, or size. It may have historical value, or provide a home for rare plants or animals.

Photo credit: Joost Gieskes

The veteran tree initiative comes from the UK. The first official veteran tree of The Hague – even of The Netherlands – is a lime or linden tree (Tilia x europea) on the Clingendael Estate. This was planted around 1733.

I came across it on my walks during the first 2020 lockdown: Clingendael is close to the camping where I had my caravan. I was intrigued to find a tree in a corner of a field with a fence round it.

A veteran tree is protected and allowed to remain in place forever. A ‘monumental’ tree may be cut down when it becomes dangerous or diseased.

Japanese flowering cherry, tree. 92, 13 m wide.

The Hague local authority has nominated 10 trees and invites people to vote for five of these to become a veteran tree. The five trees that don’t get veteran status will become monumental trees. All the nominated trees are between 70 and 220 years old.

This is much harder than choosing a political party!

Will I choose that Japanese cherry, or the ’12 Broers’, tree no. 73, a 220-year-old oak that had a tough life (cut down often) and now has 12 trunks (the brothers), or choose the 145-year-old Mourning beech that houses falcons. I will let you know.