Ticket To Ride

I was once deported from Holland. Well, not actually deported as such; it was more of an 'assisted exit'. I'd been staying in Amsterdam with the parents of an old college friend from my Oxford days (she was Dutch). Their house was quite peculiar really – I seem to remember it was an apartment on the ground floor of a tall, old building but the spare bedroom (which I was allocated) wasn't in their apartment at all. To get to it I had to take three flights of stairs, go out onto the roof, and enter through the window into an attic bedroom of the house next door. Not a huge inconvenience, you might think, until you wake up in the middle of the night dying for a slash.

Well, the parents of this girl suddenly decided to evict me. This was fair enough, I didn't have enough cash with me to pay for either a ferry or plane ticket (this was in 1973 – long before the time when everyone had credit cards), so they called the police and told them there was an 'alien' in their home. Hmm, ET I was not, but I suppose they had a point. I was eating their food after all.

I was delivered to the local police station at about 10:00 a.m. and spent the rest of the day in the custody of a series of friendly (but rather puzzled) young men in uniform. They put me in a room with a glass door – it had no handle on the inside. I had to bang on this glass door every time I needed a light because although I had nearly a whole carton of cigarettes with me, I foolishly had left my lighter in the attic bedroom of my friend's parents' neighbour.

These long-haired police officers brought me coffee and cakes before putting me into the back of a grill-windowed black van and transporting me to a second police station in a town about an hour's drive from Amsterdam. Here a new set of policemen fed me with chicken pie and carrots (which I reckoned was distinctly un-Dutch), and even gave me a beer. Then, like in an AA Relay system, I was moved to another town, then another – each time being generously fed and watered and given lights for my cigarettes – before arriving at the Hook of Holland at about 9:00 p.m. The harbour police locked me in a cell for an hour, but it was no hardship because I was still allowed to smoke and, by then, one of the officers had given me a small book of matches.

A fresh car then whisked me to the dockside and I was escorted up a special gangplank of my own. I looked across at the passenger gangplank further along the ship and saw a massive queue, so I felt quite privileged. This must be what it's like to be a celebrity, I thought.

A very civilized nation, the Dutch.