Photos © Graham Catley,
www.nyctea.co.ukTitle © Jonathan Safran Foer
As the swifts arrive on the Bosweg, so does everything else fall into place. The newspaper boy and the bomb scare, Karst Tate’s spectacular killing on Queen’s day ...
How did Karst know our neighbourhood so bloody damned well? Not many people knew this, but that was because bewteen 10 and 5 years ago he lived at Bosweg 21 (local drugs and punk scene). The present (nice) punks were the ones who put up the orange flags in our (otherwise) very “nice” street. Our strange newspaper boy must have had a precognition of Koninginnedag but his alarm-system was tripped a couple of weeks early by the fake bomb at nr. 25 (his nervousness was daily increasing as recent weeks went by). At number 23, almost nobody ever stays for longer than two years, but those who do, commit suicide. Then there was the Volvo which crashed into the oak across the road from us when its driver had a heart-attack. To clinch it all, yesterday I discovered that the mother of one of my students lives two doors from Karst’s previous residence not far away in Velp.
Back in the 30's a small airoplane crashed into the local christian high-school killing some dozens of children. The pilot wanted to show off to his mother who lived close by.
Do you believe in coincidence? As quantum physics teaches us, everything is connected and everything that is possible is obligatory; only chance rules. See “Elementary particles” by Michel Houlebecque and “Mobius Dick” by Andrew Crumey.
We have another black spot close by on the J C Wilslaan (mysterious car and bicycle accidents, attacks by a buzzard). The nearby pleasant woods contained one of the largest nazi weapons dumps, and was scene of mass executions. But there are many places of overpowering positive energy too. Do you know what our local free newspaper is called? The three towns triangle. Triangle: ring a bell?
Our area was a centre of intense religious activity in neolithic times. Woodhenges, burial mounds, sacred lakes, ceremonial roads. Apeldoorn has the largest number of churches of different denominations in the Netherlands and a booming New-Age business. Nothing is changed.