Dutch double

IFLA has its headquarters in The Hague - a small suite of offices provided (without charge) by the Royal Library, conveniently sited just round the corner from Den Haag Centraal railway station - with fast and frequent trains to Schiphol airport, as the travel guides would put it.

There's lots to see and do in The Hague but you can find out for yourself with a bit of simple web searching - http://www.denhaag.com/ is the official site.  It was wet and windy last week while I was there so I postponed my intended train ride to the seaside at Scheveningen and instead visited the Mauritshuis to enjoy a fine exhibition of Dutch portrait painting - including Vermeer's Girl with a pearl earring.  If that girl were alive today she'd make a fortune from image rights - posters, mouse mats, notepads, umbrellas and all manner of giftware. She's the star of the souvenir shop as well as the exhibition gallery.

Museums and fine buildings are one feature of The Hague - a fine public transport system is another.  IFLA Secretary General Peter Lor and his wife Monika invited the GB members to their home for supper one evening so we got first-hand experience of what seemed like an excellent tram system.  Trams and bikes appear to get people around The Hague much more effectively than buses and cars get people around English cities - but that's an outsider's impression and Dutch commuting is probably just as miserable as the English experience.

The evening with Peter and Monika was the fifth of December, significant in Dutch culture as the feast of "Sinterklaas" or St. Nicholas - a subject which provokes disquiet from more politically correct commentators on Dutch society.  Sinterklaas himself looks - at least to this commentator - rather silly in a Monty Pythonesque way with Saint Nick's staff and mitre an odd contrast to the red cloak and jolly white beard reminiscent (but don't let the Dutch hear me say this) of good old Santa. The problem is his companion, "Zwarte Piet" or Black Peter - a kind of capering jester in exotic garb and (I kid you not) blackface make-up.  This made me feel distinctly queasy although the Dutch seem to treat the whole thing as a jolly jape with no dodgy undertones - perhaps modernist deconstructivism hasn't reached the Netherlands yet.  Wishing to know more, I committed two unforgivable library land sins and by Googling "Black Peter" found an excellent article on Wikipedia - with links to a couple of trenchant criticisms of the whole thing as indicative of latent racism in Dutch society.  Although when I discussed this with a couple of expat Englishmen living in The Hague, they dismissed the notion and went for the (probably just as offensive) view that some aspects of Dutch society are just plain silly.

It's all another example - like the discussions I had last year with Maori colleagues about access to indigenous knowledge or the debate about whether the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed should have been published (or, for that matter, about whether a teddy bear should have been named) - of how complicated issues of cross-cultural interaction can become.

And so I returned from The Hague - by train, but that's another story - with images of two young Dutch women in my mind.  One was the face of  the Girl with a pearl earring.  The other was the face of Jude, bar-keeper of my favourite watering hole in The Hague, when she appeared behind her bar, later that same evening (after supper with Peter and Monika) in full Black Peter rig including the blackface make-up.  It's a Dutch double which leaves me somewhat perplexed - but very grateful that involvement with IFLA is opening my eyes to the complexities of cultural diversity!