Amsterdam

De Tweede Kamer which translates as the Second Chamber is officially called the House of Representatives and is the lower house of the States General, the providers of law in the Netherlands. The higher house is the Senate which is called the Eerste Kamer (First Chamber) which controls that new laws are in agreement with other laws and European regulations. These two Chambers form The States General and are situated in The Hague.

The Tweede Kamer consists of one hundred and fifty seats which are filled by national elections run on a proportional representation basis. The seventy-five seats of the Senate are decided by the members of the twelve Provincial States and the three Carribean States of the Dutch Antilles.

The Tweede Kamer is also a cannabis coffee shop situated in Heisteeg in the middle of Amsterdam near Dam Square and the Singelgracht. I was on holiday and found myself standing outside this coffeeshop: I really did fancy going in and try some hash as this was so different to what I was used to because of living in England with it's restrictive laws on cannabis use. I couldn't smoke cigarettes. When I was a young teenager I tried to smoke to show off and look interesting to my friends, but when I did, I ended up choking, spluttering with a red face and looking ridiculous, so smoking cannabis was out of the question. So what to do? I wanted to be daring.

I became very courageous and walked through the door to the counter and explained my problem to the very nice, tall and blonde man standing behind the counter. He looked puzzled for a fraction of a second at me and then invited me to take a seat at the counter. He then placed a plain white ceramic tile in front of me and from a tin on a shelf behind the counter took out a small lump of something and weighed it. He nodded when he saw the reading on the scales. He then put the lump of something on the tile in front of me. It looked like camel dung; it was greeny brown, moist, crumbly and with a very fresh vegetable smell. He told me to take out my credit card (how much is this going to cost me? I thought to myself), then he used the card to cut into the lump, making very small pieces on the tile. He gave me the card so I could carry on doing it myself, and told me to break it up into almost a powder.

I carried on for about ten minutes while he toked on his joint and went off to do other things. He came back, nodded in satisfaction at the little pile I had made of the camel dung and got a box of ready made chocolate drink out of his his fridge with the words “Chocomel” all over it. He poured the brown contents into a mug and heated it from the coffee machine. He sprinkled the camel dung dust into the brown drink and stirred it vigorously and told me to sip it slowly. It tasted of chocolate with a green aroma. While I did this he took a few more tokes from his joint and explained that he didn't like to ingest hash as he then had no control over it, when smoking he could take a few puffs and then stop when he got a little high. When eating the stuff it was too easy to take a lot all in one go and it went down into the belly and there was no going back. I nodded in agreement: I had no idea of what I was doing. He charged me seven euros.

I took the mug of chocolate and sat at a side table where a woman was sitting.

“Do you mind me sitting here?”

“ No not all your company would be great!”

She was Dutch and could speak English perfectly with a charming accent and it wasn't as I expected. She had a huge fat trumpet on the go. Her voice was a little deep and she was quite tall and thin and then I realised that she may have changed gender. She looked at my chocolate, smelt it and exclaimed in an loud and amazed voice Hot Chocolate! How decadent, divine and bohemian! How wicked! We hit it off immediately. We shared life stories and declared life long love for each other and she was absolutely amazing. It hadn't been easy for her, she had been through so much to declare her true gender to the world and I was very impressed. She got to learn all about my troubles and why I had ended up on holiday and alone in Amsterdam.

By now the hash was starting to hit me. My mouth became very dry and I started to float. My thoughts became ethereal and slow. I wondered about the nature of the Universe and why did life exist, and where was I going and why I was going there. My eyes saw the people outside gliding slowly along the cobblestones and my companion was a beautiful extension of my own thoughts. She smiled at me and our conversation became slow and deep. I looked out at the pavement, wondering who all these people were and why they were all these people and not some other people, and where they were going and why there were going there anyway and would they ever get back? I could hear voices coming from distance spaces echoing in the room, flying round it and leaving from where they entered and I couldn't hear what they were saying. The laughter was angelic and came from heaven.

We spent a pleasant hour together slowing down and taking stock of everything, of trying to find our own direction and I became very spaced out; and very hungry. I said I was hungry and she said she knew what to do. We got up and she lead me out of the bar, along the pavements and through some alleys. It was like walking on pink marshmallow, walking very slowly almost floating on rosebuds, on feather quilts, and seeing all the people hanging in stasis on invisible stilts.

She lead me to a herring stall, stood me against a wall and handed me a dish containing a roll with slices of raw herring with chopped up mild raw onion, and it tasted delicious. It was the best food in the world. I was ravenously hungry so I had another helping. I could have eaten it all afternoon. Then I got worried about how I was going to float back to my rented room. I knew where the tram stop was and I had a weekly tram pass, but it's no joke walking over Dam Square and getting up the steps of the tram when you are high. She was so good. I had to get Tram Number Four to Fredericksplein and then walk back to Utrechtsestraat and turn off at Utrechtsedwarstraat and she went with me all the way to make sure I got safely back to my room. She was my angel and I didn't even know her name. I still wonder who she was and if I would recognise her again.

It wouldn't be the same without the onions.