Once upon a time there was a music-maker, and he went all the way from Dublin to Amsterdam to play a couple-a gigs. They gigs, they were good gigs, and the musician and his manager celebrated long, long, into an already long night before embarking the next day onto a train that would take them half-way home. The train took them to Brussels, where they would switch to the newly inaugurated service that magically rode under the sea, all the way to London, where the streets, they do say, are paved with gold.
Our revelling travellers had already learned that some streets of the Dutch capital cannot, i’sooth, be walked upon, for they are made but of water. They had, however, heard say that the streets of the metropolis on the Zuyder Zee are done made of hashish and this, unlike London’s gold, they had found to be true, whereupon the paved streets of Amsterdam proved every bit as untraversable as any of the wetter type.
Be that as it may, they poured themselves onto the express conveyance that would whisk them to the land of sprouts, and on the journey, did devolve into discussion derogatory, one to another, and did cause consternation to the discomfort of the voyagers who shared their carriage.
Upon their arrival in the Belgian capital, their controversy continued uncurtailed on the station platform and, the cellphone being of recent popularity at the time, a fellow passenger of theirs did call up the police who, wouldn’t you know, maintain a presence in the very station at which the train had arrived.
Now, this was not such a portentous development, for officers dispatched to intercept our two travelling troubadour debaters demanded that they immediately empty their pockets, whereupon the more-singing and less-managing of the duo revealed his possession of part of a paving block of Amsterdam: a baggie of the stuff gardeners hate.
It was shortly afterwards that my telephone rang. The main rail terminus in Brussels is situated in St Gillis, which is a short hop over the Parc de Forêt and the Altitude Cent from where I then lived, nestled next to the Tennis Club of Forêt. Could I attend at the railway station’s police station?
It was late but duty is duty, and down I went, for the man who’d been taken into custody had no practice of either the Dutch or French language. That was where I, the interpreter, came in.
There is an aspect or two to being caught with drugs in your possession. The first is that it is probably not a brilliant idea to draw a public spectacle to yourself in a train or a public area such as a railway station to an extent that goes beyond entertaining the general public and starts to put them into a state of alarm. Especially not with the all too recent advent of the mobile telephone…
The second aspect is that, even if, as in this case, the state prosecutor decides, on balance, not to press charges and to let the miscreant off with a warning, the warning that is given is not restricted to the words I warn you. No, that would be far too easy. A warning is a lecture. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. During the beginning and middle parts, it can appear that the end is non-existent, but, I can assure all and sundry, that, with patience and endurance, the end does in fact finally arrive.
If the audience for this particular lecture grew impatient with his trusted manager on the train from Holland, his forbearance in the face of this youthful inspector of Belgian police, even without the twirling moustaches of Hercule Poirot, was exemplary in all respects.
The crime of possession was unthinking and unnecessary. The decision not to prosecute was thinking and necessary. The lecture was necessary and unnecessary. The place wasn’t New York, but Brussels. The Fairytale is no fairytale. And the singer, if not the song, is now no longer with us.
Image: Masao Nakagami, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons