On the 4th of March I had a date at the Letterkundig Museum in The Hague to view my self-portrait which has been acquired by the museum for their National Writers’ Portrait Collection. Youthful writers were very thin on the ground because they hadn’t yet earned their portrait, and so the average age was around eighty.

‘If only the Dutch Prime Minister was a proper bully,’ was my lament when I heard of the commotion about Gordon Brown’s behaviour. Bully Balkenende; it sounds great but doesn’t fit his utterly proper personality. Recently, the Dutch governing coalition broke up because several cabinet ministers failed to back each other in public. We don’t, however, know if there was much shouting during this process. In as far as we know, no one was pulled from their chair.