The Canal Ring on a Second Visit, Thirty Years Later

There is a particular expression on the face of a man walking out of the central station for the second time in his life, thirty years after the first. It is not quite surprise. The water is where it was, the gables still lean as though listening to each other, and the trams still ring their bells at pedestrians who ignore them. What catches him out is the traffic of small things: the bicycles, three for every one he remembers, the card terminals in places that once took only coins, the queues outside museums that used to be walked into.

The house hears from a good many guests in exactly that position, and the messages have a shape in common. They start with a date and a hotel, and then there is a line that is not strictly needed, something like: it has been a very long time. That line is welcome. It changes nothing in the booking, but it tells whoever reads the thread that the reply should explain rather than assume.

The first afternoon belongs to the city

Most returning visitors do the same thing on the first day, and they are right to. They walk. Along the Herengracht, across to the Jordaan, back through the narrow streets behind the Dam. The walk is partly memory and partly correction, finding out which cafe is still there and which corner has become a phone shop. By five o'clock the feet have had enough and the question of the evening arrives.

This is where the arrangement has changed more than the streets have. Thirty years ago an evening of this kind usually meant going somewhere. Now it means staying put. The house keeps no premises at all; a therapist comes to the room you are already in, forty to sixty minutes after you confirm, anywhere in central Amsterdam. For a man whose feet have done eleven kilometres of canal edge, not having to go out again is the whole appeal.

What to put in the message

Keep it to the facts: the hotel and, once you know it, the room number; the hour, given in Amsterdam time; the length; a name from the roster if one has caught your eye, or a sentence about the kind of evening you have in mind; and whether you are alone. The reply says who is free and what it costs. On a first booking with the house, half the fee goes ahead to confirm it, by card or by Revolut, Wise or crypto, and the other half is paid when she arrives.

A returning visitor often asks what has become of the telephone. The answer is that writing has replaced it, and after one booking most people prefer the change. The address, the hour and the figure sit in the thread, and you can read them again at breakfast if you are not sure you remembered correctly.

The room after a long day outside

Canal-side hotel rooms are handsome and cold near the windows. Turn the heating up before you go down for an early dinner, not after you come back, so the room has an hour to catch up. Draw the heavy curtains. Put the lamp on and the overhead light off. Ask the desk in the afternoon for a couple of extra pillows; they make lying face down easier to arrange and turning over simpler.

She brings her own towels and oil and takes them away with her, so the room needs nothing more than that. Clear the chair by the door for her coat.

Ninety minutes, not sixty

After a day like that, an hour tends to feel short. Ninety minutes leaves the first quarter hour free for sitting down and agreeing the warmth, the light, the pressure and the pace, and still leaves the long middle of the booking intact. Two hours is the choice for someone who would like the clock to disappear. Nothing is added for the evening or the weekend, and nothing for the journey across the ring.

What has stayed exactly the same

She decides what the session includes, and she says so at the start in her own words, together with her limits, which then hold for the whole visit. That was always the way of it; the difference now is that it is said aloud before anything begins, so nobody guesses. She may ask to see a photo document at the door, whatever age you plainly are, because everyone present has to be twenty-one or over. It is looked at and handed back.

The second visit to a city has its own pleasures, and one of them is knowing, this time, how you like an evening to go. The page for guests back in Amsterdam after many years sets out the rest of what has moved since the first visit, and the then and now guide goes through each change one at a time.