All my emails this morning:

• A discount for a Sleepy Sharky
• Another discount for a Sleepy Sharky
• An email from Freecycle Amsterdam offering cat food and a fan

Nothing else.

Yesterday, I suddenly lost internet access again and it took me about half an hour to reboot the computer. Both my phone and my tablet were way too warm. (For those who don’t know that, equipment getting unusually warm can be a sign of hacking activity.) The timing and its supposed effects were “interesting”; that is, what happened and what he possibly tried to suggest was interesting. He’s still doing his best to hang on to the idea of total control of me and my life, it seems, with me the rabbit (fox?) in his electronic cage. He can’t help it. I’m like the goat fox in Le petit prince to him, I suppose. He’s called the book magic.

At the start of October, “he” tried to help me a few times, but as I have no idea of his intentions and he might just as easily be trying to trip me up again when he appears to be trying to help, his “helping” usually merely makes me panic and despair and really throws me. Besides, it’s two different people who are in my equipment, they let me know when I was still in Portsmouth. These times, he really was trying to be helpful.

For anyone who wonders, Freecycle is almost exclusively used by Americans and Canadians in the Netherlands. Something like Freecycle is not really a Dutch thing. Money needs to be involved, I guess, before Dutch people take anything seriously, and it preferably needs to be big. Maybe it is the result of the perpetual threat of being flooded by the sea that this country – a large part of it under sea level – has lived with for centuries. In the 1990s, Pinellas County in Florida already allowed people to bring in rests of paint etc that others then could take instead of it being thrown away. They simply put up some shelves at their incinerator plant, if I recall correctly. I don’t think we did a lot of recycling in those days. When I mentioned that at a relevant meeting in the Netherlands, people just blinked. The Dutch seem unable to see that many small and easy individual steps add up too. (However, Dutch people may ask you to sponsor their mountain-climbing holiday in Africa for a good cause, although that daft idea now seems to have gone out of fashion.)