‘Stop telling me to shut up,’ I shouted at Hot Danish mid-row. His phone beeped and he picked it up from the ironing board (his regular Blackberry checking/texting/emailing during our time together has also caused a number of arguments – he’s resorted to checking it while going to the bathroom). ‘Even the neighbours are asking you to be quiet,’ HD said without looking up from his phone. ‘What shall I say?’
‘That you won’t say my bum looks big in this dress again,’ I joked when I eventually calmed down. Needless to say I am now dreading bumping into the neighbours.

I was excited about Natasha’s visit. She wanted to see Anne Frank’s house but was open to anything else. ‘We must see the Red Light District,’ I said. ‘I know we all hear about it, but it’s still really weird to see it.’
‘Why do English people always want to see the Red Light District?’ HD said. He had a point. Groups of Englishmen easily outnumbered other nationalities during our brief visit (a mugging of a fat Englishman by a well-dressed local took place as we walked down an alley so we swiftly sought a cab to get home).

‘Guess how long the average punter spends with a prostitute in the RLD?,’ one of HD’s friends asked us during Pride Amstelveld (an outdoor dance party during Amsterdam’s Gay Pride weekend). Six minutes was his answer. We were more interested in where the women are from (mainly Eastern Europe apparently) and why they are working there. The RLD is regulated (‘The women pay taxes,’ HD said) so we ruled out exploitation…

‘Where’s the library?’ I asked HD.
‘You need to bring proof of address and photo ID to join,’ he said.
‘We just want to do some research,’ I said. He seemed confused by our choice of trip until we told him we wanted to find out more about the RLD workers. The library visit was unsuccessful so we resorted to the internet… ‘I think you’d better change your job title on your Linkedin profile,’ I said to Natasha after we read that a lot of RLD prostitutes refer to themselves as entrepreneurs.

After the Anne Frank house visit, we ordered quiche and salad and sat at a table outside vegetarian restaurant De Bolhoed. ‘HD always keeps a straight face so it was hard to tell whether he was joking or not when he told us to be quiet because we were putting him off his breakfast when we were swapping our gay friends’ sex stories this morning,’ Natasha said. At that moment we felt the full glare of an overweight German (we presumed she was German because she was reading a German novel) with short cropped hair sitting at the table next to us and we wished we had shut up.