Column | Taxi Castricum – NRC

I participated Taxi Castricum, a television show in which Rutger Castricum plays the taxi driver who takes you to a destination of your choice. Along the way, he listens to you, occasionally interrupted by director André van der Toorn, who has been the voice of for years road robbers.

I didn’t think they were an unpleasant duo.

I’m always cooler than the taxi driver, but not this time because Rutger was sitting completely cool next to me in the Tesla company which was packed with cameras for the occasion. Rutger enjoys working from the car as an interviewer. During the election period, he drives around the country with B politicians and he also drove the “Klimaatkar”, in which he held sustainability talks.

We drove from Wormer to Arnhem, where I was going to promote the book, so the drive was fine. I had several books with me, but it’s no coincidence that the conversation veered in a completely different direction.

I used to do everything to promote my books, but there were hardly any programs that invited me. The reality now is that I can go anywhere with my book, the downside is that the book is secondary.

The investigators think it’s beautiful, they even take it sometimes, as one takes a sandwich when one is not hungry, but are especially interested in everything else.

I had several books with me, but the conversation veered off in a completely different direction.

The question arose as to whether I had made any progress with all this interest. I thought I had foiled the television manufacturers by requiring André in advance that I be filmed for a maximum of half an hour so that it would be impossible to cut the book. The plan was to change cars on a carpool lane near Amsterdam. The plan worked all the way to Zaandam, where we found ourselves in slow to stationary traffic.

André, who had a lot of freeway experience professionally, said the traffic was like that, and then we had a whole conversation about the pros and cons of driving a Tesla. He also had a packet of Snelle Jelle, crackers and water. We started eating this after an hour, when we were stuck on the highway of regret. I swallowed the defeat in silence and, with my book in my lap, discussed all the nonsense I got myself into. I was promised the cover would come out okay. In a face-to-face, television always beats the book.

Marcel van Roosmalen writes here an exchange column with Ellen Deckwitz.