OH WELL

I put the reward for my returned notebook pages in a Tesco's bag last night and left it to be collected outside the door of Stage 1, as planned. I was about to walk off and watch some bands - Emmy the Great, followed maybe by the Fleet Foxes - but then I got curious and decided to hang around by the entrance and stake out the carrier bag instead. So I bought two beers and stood there pretending to wait for someone to come back from the toilet. Occasionally I did a realistic ‘disgruntled' face and checked the clock on my phone and rolled my eyes and sighed. But don't worry; the Tesco's bag was in the corner of my eye at all times. At about quarter to nine an old gentleman came and stood near it and nudged it around with his shoe. He looked over his shoulder and then very slowly bent down and opened the bag and peered inside. ‘That's him!' I thought, and I was about to go up and slap him on the back and shake his hand really hard when he stood up and shuffled off into the crowd. Soon after, a tiny androgynous child came up to the bag and stuck its whole head inside until its mum noticed what it was doing and yanked it up and smacked it on the wrist. I think maybe the tiny androgynous child went away with one of the bottles of shower gel sticking out of its mouth, but I don't reckon it was my anonymous benefactor, anyway. By now my beers were both finished and I needed the toilet myself. I was gone for maybe two minutes, three at the most, and when I returned the bag was gone. ‘Fine,' I thought, ‘be like that,' and wandered off to watch the Fleet Foxes with a feeling of anticlimax. Tonight I'm going to be on the same stage - the big one - to read a chapter of my not-yet-published-anywhere novel. I have a ten minute slot just before Liam Finn, and am fully aware that no one knows who the fuck I am. At the moment the worst I can imagine is either a kind of painful, bored silence with occasional groaning, or the whole crowd simultaneously throwing glass bottles of urine at me. I found out this morning that An, my translator, is off to an important family occasion somewhere else in Holland, and I feel bad that she'll be have to leave the festivities tonight to work on this crappy column, so I've decided to make things a bit easier for her and translate the rest of it myself, using one of those automatic translation websites: Hallo An, was werkelijk goed om u en het werk met u te ontmoeten. Dank aan alle dingen die wij en besprekingen die wij op het Overschrijden van Grens hebben gezien bijwoonden, ik heb een veel betere inzicht in en een eerbied nu voor de rol van de vertaler - het werkelijk klink als heel wat hard werk - en ik wens u alle beste in de toekomst. (If you don't understand the above, maybe you could turn it back in to English using babelfish.yahoo.com - the site I used. Or maybe An will translate it into English herself in the Dutch version ...)