Strandpaviljoen de Kwartel

Strandpaviljoen de Kwartel has style. It's all wood and canvas here, tastefully restrained in its approach. It looks like an old harbour club, a kind of non-posh place for posh people to hang out in. It's interesting to contrast the beach clubs at the southern beach, where de Kwartel is located, with those at the northern beach. Those in the latter location are often flashy, and loud in their design, probably also because they're located closer to each other so they need to compete with their neighbours. The patrons are young, twenty- and thirtysomethings. At the southern beaches, things are often more low key. The beach clubs are far from each other, so the atmosphere is more quiet. The patrons are often quite older as well, especially early in the morning. Later in the day, they are joined by families with young children. De Kwartel has a promising menu. All food is promised to be organic and together with an impressive wine card, de Kwartel has a profile quite different from other beach clubs.

My girlfriend has joined us today - it's a Saturday. Cycling here, Rihanna Gaga wondered why it was taking us so long to get to the beach. Indeed, it's been a while since we went to one of the more removed beach clubs. But getting here was a delight: the Southern dune park was still very much in bloom, with pink roses, yellow flowers and orange berries everywhere. It all smelled lovely and the sky - all stark blue above us with dramatically shaped clouds at both horizonds - added to the atmosphere. Rihanna Gag was pointing out shapes in the clouds: giraffes, cars and trains. It's a game she loves playing when she's on the back of my bike.

We sit down at the edge of the beach, so that Rihanna Gaga can play in the sand if she wants to. But she stays close to us, preferring to sit on her mother's lap. It's been like this for two weeks now: when we're together, she won't easily let go of us. We have to hold her hand, play with her, talk to her - she demands our full attention and a lot of affection, while at the same time regularly exploding in angry shouts or sobbing inconsolably about something small like wanting to sit on the couch right where one of us is sitting. It's all very understandable, considering she's just starting school and the changes in her life must feel as enormous to her.

Actually, they feel enormous to me too. She's been very brave about it all: new school, new daycare, completely new faces, except for one girl that she knows from her old daycare... Mostly, she hasn't complained at all and seems to very much roll with it all (although, like I said, she clearly needs to let off steam every once in a while). But I've found it difficult to see the enormous focus on discipline that she's encountering at school. Entire lessons devoted to sitting straight, needing to be quiet, putting your hand in the air if you want to ask something... Rihanna Gaga is very impressed with it all and does her best to keep the rules - but I find it a bit hard to swallow. I'm reminded of how one of my favourite philosphers - Michel Foucault - compares living in a society with being part of an army. New recruits learn to move in an unnatural way when learning how to march, and that's how they are prepared for life as a soldier: all individuality is taking out of the way they walk, and their natural way of using their body is replaced by an uniform set of movements. The more you submit to this, the higher you will rise in the army's ranks: you give up individuality and in return, the army will provide you with an identity - the less individuality, the more identity (i.e. the more stars and stripes on your uniform). Society does the same: the more you conform to the identities made available to you by society (such as 'men', 'woman', 'Dutch', 'Muslim', 'gay', 'straight', etc.), the more you will lose your unique individuality. And it seems to start here, first year of school, by disciplining the bodies of these four year olds.

Oh, I'm probably overthinking things. Reading too much philosophy does that to you. And anyway, Rihanna Gaga is not going to be helped by me telling her to resist this discipline, so I've been biting my tongue around her, listening to her stories about school with an encouraging smile. But I have been having a hard time these last two weeks, finding it all very, very depressing. To quote the Supertramp song "School" (the lyrics of which I've found comforting in an almost adolescent way for the past two weeks): "Maybe I'm mistaken expecting you to fight/Or maybe I'm just crazy, I don't know wrong from right".

Anyway, things did come to a head last Thursday. There's a rule that the children have to shake hands with the teachers before entering class. One of Rihanna Gaga's teachers is quite understanding that she is stil refusing to do so. After all, everything is so new. And we never taught her to shake hands (which could be a mistake from our part, but oh well). The other teacher, however, insists she shakes hands. And she absolutely refuses to do so. It's not just her being timid (and what does that mean anyway, 'being timid'? From a child's perspective, I can imagine this shaking hands-business is just too intimidating and plain ridiculous), it also has to do with her character: start pushing her and she responds with a firm refusal. She's incredibly stubborn and has an iron will.  So she and her teacher had a tense face-off. The teacher warned her that she couldn't enter the classroom (which seemed a bit silly as a threat to me, because, well - the classroom certainly didn't look that enticing to Rihanna Gaga at that moment, and I'm pretty sure that given the choice she'd probably have preferred to come home with me than staying with this woman trying to control her). And she just stood there. After encouraging Rihanna Gaga to shake hands once, I kept out of it and after a while the teacher backed down, allowing us to pass (and frankly, thereby undermining her authority, because if there's one thing I learned teaching quite difficult students in Tunisia, it's that you should never draw a line and then allow it to be crossed).

By then, Rihanna Gaga's stress levels were high, but I read her a book and she calmed down, especially when she saw her friend arrive. When I got ready to leave, however, she was much more tense than before. When I turned to wave, she couldn't respond my gesture because the teacher had walked up to her to try shaking her hand once more. And then, when she refused, the teacher just grabbed her hand - and that's when the crying started. To make matters worse, her chair was taken up and put next to the teacher's because - coincidentally - it was also her turn to sit next to the teacher that day. But it was clear that at this point, that looked threatening, rather than fun.

I strongly believe that parents shouldn't interfere in the classroom and I resent parents who will always defend their little princes and princesses, but there and then parental instinct took over and I walked back into the classroom, comforted Rihanna Gaga, took up an empty chair from somewhere else and put it next to her friend to create a safe place for my daughter - ignoring some meddling children who jumped up and down around us shouting that it was her turn to sit next to the teacher, so she couldn't sit there.When she had somewhat calmed down, I got up again, told her I was going to leave now. At the door, I turned to wave and this time she waved back. When I came back to get her in the afternoon, all was well again, but from her behaviour I gathered she was still slightly shaken.

We will see if this hasn't turned school from something fun - albeit a bit scary and exciting - into something to be resented for Rihanna Gaga. We've been practicing 'shaking hands' with her for the past few days and she seems eager to overcome her inability to do so, but it also still clearly causing stress. And somewhere - although I hide it from her - I do admire her refusal to shake hands before she's ready to do so. To be honest, it's exactly what I want my daughter to be convinced of: that nobody can do something to her body without her agreeing it to be done.

I've ordered an English breakfast and my girlfriend has opted for a mackarel sandwich. I'm drinking black tea (I need a black tea first thing in the morning, but back home I didn't have time to make one), my girlfriend a latte machiato and Rihanna Gaga is messing around with an apple juice. She insists on using a spoon to drink the apple juice and we choose to ignore it - pick your battles: in her current mood, there'll probably be enough small conflicts during the rest of the day to want to avoid this one. Unfortunately, that means that a bit later she knocks over her glass and there's apple juice all over her and my girlfriend. As I wash her legs in the toilet, I tell her we've now learned that drinking your apple juice with a spoon is not a good idea so that from now on she can't do that anymore. She agrees.

Breakfast arrives and Rihanna Gaga eats large parts of my eggs and a bit of my bread. She then enjoys quite a chunk of her mother's mackarel while I eat the remainder of my breakfast: tasty sausages, well-prepared bacon, fried onion rings and buttered toast (no beans in tomato sauce). They've forgotten the orange juice that the menu promised together with the food, however, and I have to ask the waitress for that. It's quickly brought. Service is swift and polite here: a bit old-school, compared with the youthful and slightly sloppy waiters of the beach clubs at the northern beach. Rihanna Gaga is telling us about a song they were singing at school about a 'mussel man' who 'lives in Scheveningen'. It's a famous Dutch nursery rhyme and Rihanna Gaga knows it already. A running joke in our family, however, is that she sings that the 'mussel man' lives in Zwolle (where her grandparents live) rather than in Scheveningen, after which we have a mock argument about where he actually lives. So I ask her, jokingly, if she told her teacher that he lives in Zwolle, rather than in Scheveningen when they were singing the song at school. But she answers that no, she didn't, because 'at that moment we weren't allowed to speak'. Once again, my heart breaks a little, as it has done so often these past two weeks.

Rihanna Gaga really wants to go to two trampolines at the far end of de Kwartel's terrace, because there are other children there. She doesn't want to go alone, however, so first my girlfriend and then I accompany her. She mostly just stands there, looking at the other kids and not really daring to join them on the trampolines. There's a little girl she'd like to play with, but the interest is not mutual. Only after a while does she manage to find a little playmate and then she tells me I can go back to the table, adding in an encouraging voice: "you just go and read your book, you really enjoy that, don't you?" My girlfriend has left already, so I do as she tells me and open my book.

On the trampoline, Rihanna Gaga has a great time jumping on the trampoline. There's two other girls of her age and she's emboldened by their example, so that soon she's jumping more freely and daringly than before. After a while, she comes to my table and tells me she'd like to eat cake. I look up and see that the girl that she was playing with is also eating cake together with her dad. "Great idea," I tell her, and add teasingly: "I wonder where you'd got that from?" She smiles knowingly and we order a carrot cake. For the next hour, she's busy playing with the other girls and every once in a while, she will come back to the table to have a bite of the carrot cake while I sip a fresh mint tea. When the other girls have gone, she tells me she's ready to go as well. I pay and we start climbing the stairs up the dunes, to where our bike is.