Jeugdbrand

The first few minutes of ‘3 × hullo, hullo’ sound like a little mole creeping up through the soil. The little thing hoes and scoops up some sand, building a small pile of dirt. But then, anger... because this drives them mad—those who want their lawns clean and spotless. A clean lawn: a desire we inherited from the Brits. Dumped into our collective consciousness by humorless Victorians who enjoyed having their black pudding on the lawn. An uninspired impression from their misreading of Italian paintings. The lust for sterile gardens nudged the world into water waste and clouds of pesticides.

Well, it went like this: I open the glass door to the garden, the early morning coming to its midday end. That everyday anxiety that overcomes late risers from time to time kicks in. “Fuck, almost half a day wasted!” But abruptly, this sentence in my head gets overdubbed by the Queen’s English: “That shit mole, that blimey shit cunt mole!” I see the expat owner of our Airbnb punching his bare fists on his green lawn. A spotless lawn, but with here and there a few molehills. His grass, like a billiard cloth in a smoked bar, serves as a contrasting pathway to the black volcanic rocks at the back of the house. Behind these rocks, the ocean foams and growls. “Luv, get the poison! I wanna finish the bugger now and for good. Bloody hell!” I watch this scene with amusement, until suddenly, when the landlord notices me, he cleans up his act. “Ooh, these are funny little creatures, eh, these furry moles. Cheeky peng. Eh, fancy a cuppa?” The landlord’s head and belly are so ridiculously red that I can almost hear a lobster scream in a pot of boiling water. He looks like a walking can of Spam, its contents cooked by countless days under the Indian Ocean’s sun. The Indian Ocean, where sharks migrate between Africa and Australia. And where the Hawaiian-shirt-wearing tourist bravely builds new islands of trash. Yes, the very true meaning of re-creation. Someone once told me that lobsters don’t really scream.

Back to our mole. The creature is practically blind. In its head, a pair of eyes perfectly fit for the darkness it is usually stuffed in. Under the surface, there is no light, only smells and sounds. The mole digs through our alarmingly dry soils. Our Flemish lands—we are now leaving the island for a bit, and have arrived in our native Flanders—lands of cement and bricks. If there is still a tuft of green to be found in our oppressive villages, you can be sure that a stuffed truffle with a municipal portfolio will turn it into a drab development for impoverished architecture. Sucking our soils so dry that even another of our wasted wet summers couldn’t begin to be a solution. And so the mole hurts its tiny little digging claws on all the screed it needs to dig through.