Fight, Flight or Freeze
On the day Nikko Norte's book Unpredictable Past is published, the Dutch government announces its first pandemic measures. Nikko's press appearances are cancelled, and since returning home—to Austria—seems impossible, Nikko waits on the Dutch island of Texel for the tension in Europe to ease. He waits in vain and eventually flies out.
Travel in Fight, Flight, or Freeze with Nikko—and his wife Heidi and Moos the German shepherd—through pandemic-occupied Europe. Their flight from Austria to England and their subsequent move to Catalonia—which turns out to be even woker than England. Clashes with customs and police officers, with members of parliament, and with Germans. Memories of Afghanistan, adventures at sea, rattlesnakes during an illegal border crossing, handing out condoms in Africa, a plane with a faulty landing gear, climbing Pointe du Hoc in Normandy, and earning a green beret. Encounters with a dolphin, Eritreans skirting the Calais jungle, Graham Hancock, and Mansoor Adayfi, who survived fourteen years in Guantánamo Bay.
Fear in the sails of the world's tallest windmill, the theft of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the grim truth behind the Christmas-tree hunt—a typically Dutch phenomenon—cloak and dagger at the hairdresser’s, and life in Oradour-sur-Glane, in France, through the eyes of Marguerite Rouffanche. Zwarte Pieten performing stunts—another Dutch phenomenon, minus the stunts—a silly paragliding accident, a robbery in Spain, and ... this book is absurd! Logically so, because it tells the story of an absurd life. Unfiltered, sometimes baffling honesty and sharp observations, bundled into a manifesto for freethinkers. An authentic stance on modern life that inspires to break patterns and to act on the strength that lives within each of us ...