179. Man with a driving licence

Ramon Casas and Pere Romeu in an Automobile (1901), Ramón Casas

I.

I’m back from my blogging break. I needed the space to transform into a Man with a Driving Licence. That meant: more driving lessons during the week, more YouTube videos about driving, and sitting my test on a drizzly Thursday. “Congratulations,” said the examiner, who was younger than me. “Went well, didn’t it?”

Well enough, at any rate. At the start of the drive I overtook a cyclist just before a dangerous junction, I nearly ploughed into a group of geese crossing the road, and the engine stalled once. But the examiner never had to step in, and I stayed calm when a BMW cut me off.

So now I have my licence and I’m allowed on the road. Just goes to show: you’re never too old to learn.

II.

In 2019, Louis Theroux was interviewed by Janine Abbring in the Janskerk in Utrecht. I went with a friend and we arrived late. The church was already packed, so we had to sit at the back and spent most of the evening looking at the backs of people’s heads.

Theroux was in the country for the Dutch edition of Gotta Get Theroux This (published here as Geen taboe voor Theroux). That afternoon I’d bought an English copy at the local bookshop. There was no way I’d turn up to the event and find there were no books left to buy and have signed. That happened to me once at a Nick Cave talk at the Utrecht library. They won’t catch me out twice.

After the interview I thanked Theroux for his inspiring way of doing journalism, and he thanked me for the kind words. Then he wrote weird wishes in my book.

The biography then sat unread on my shelf for seven years (the interview had covered pretty much his entire career, so I didn’t feel much urge to start straight away), but during my short blogging break I finally picked it up. The book is a curious mix of personal anecdotes, retellings of scenes from his documentaries, and behind-the-scenes glimpses. I loved it.

It sent me back to all sorts of Theroux programmes. The one about the Westboro Baptist Church, for instance. The Most Hated Family in America is a Theroux classic, about unhinged Christians who protest against homosexuality and shout that everyone except them is going to hell.

Over the course of twelve years, Theroux went back to the church a few times. The last documentary is worth watching, because it nicely shows how even the most committed hate preacher ends up saddled with an unhappy life.

Theroux often ends up in bizarre places where people have come untethered from reality. And then he goes looking for humanity there. He’s made portraits of neo-Nazis, manosphere influencers, UFO believers and sex workers. “Early in my career, journalists sometimes asked if I ever worried whether I might run out of weird subjects,” Theroux writes in his biography. He can’t imagine it.

“Weirdness is built into the human condition. It is an inescapable fact of life. We are born. From somewhere invisible to us our consciousness emerges. It flickers for a few years, lighting up our crania like the flame inside a magic lantern, then sputters out. A once-thinking, once-feeling mass of humanity becomes inanimate. In the passage between those two points, we are slaves to a set of impulses hidden from us, both within us and without. Sex is weird, religion is weird, family is weird. Having sex with multiple partners is weird. Having sex with the same person for seventy years is also weird. Our emotions are weird, and not having emotions is weird. Death is really weird. I find it hard to imagine what a rational human would even look like. I am getting a vision of Spock, but he was half-Vulcan.”

III.

During my blogging break I didn’t write, but I did tinker with my website. All sorts of things have changed and been added, and yet at first glance everything still looks the same. A short changelog:

  • The typeface has changed from Arial to Source Serif 4, because I want the texts to have a more book-like feel.
  • Paragraphs are now indented, and the text is justified on both sides, with hyphenation.
  • There’s a menu! It opens up all kinds of possibilities. For now you’ll already find a blogroll (with blogs by other people I like to read) and a library with a list of every book I’ve read since 2017.
  • I’ve added an RSS feed, so you can follow this blog through RSS readers too. A relief for anyone who isn’t a fan of Substack. (And on my own website you read my blogs the way they’re meant to be read, in my own design. I even wondered whether I ought to quit Substack altogether, and retreat to write in the introverted calm of my own site. But for now I’ll leave things as they are.)

PS.

Matthijs van Nieuwkerk has an interview podcast called Schuilen in Schoonheid. In it he talks to people about where they seek solace in anxious times. I enjoyed the first two episodes, with Astrid Holleeder and Fresku.

For anyone who likes a bit of fun: ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic visited NPR for a Tiny Desk Concert.

Westside Cowboy is a pleasantly energetic guitar band I saw earlier this year opening for Geese at Paradiso. Their debut record It Goes On is out now. Below you can watch them play on Jools Holland.

I enjoyed this interview by Gijs Groenteman and Maral Noshad Sharifi with the writer Carry Slee.

I wasn’t at Lowlands, but I did catch a few things on TV. Highlight: IJSLAND.

You just read blog №179, written in the week of 31 August to 6 September 2026. Subscribe to my newsletter and you’ll receive it in your inbox every Sunday, free of charge.