Silence

There’s a bandstand in the Vondel Park which sits alone and isolated in a pond.

Erected in a more genteel era, it stands there like some memorial to lost music. A faint reminder of polite, half imagined Sundays. Of violins and easy strolls and Sunday best suits.

Nowadays there is no music. The skaters in the park, with their beatboxes and isotonic muscles, have no call for violins and genteel ways.

Today’s pace is fast, bold, brash and fun.

So the bandstand stands lost and silent and forlorn.

The loneliest structure in the world.