Friday, 2 May 2025

Prince Andrew should never be allowed to return to public life



Prince Andrew should never be allowed to return to public life

Polly Hudson

The death of Virginia Giuffre - who accused the Duke of York of sexual assault - surely makes his desire to resume royal duties out of the question

 

Thu 1 May 2025 11.00 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/01/prince-andrew-should-never-be-allowed-to-return-to-public-life

 

Everyone talks about Prince Andrew’s “fall from grace” but that raises an awkward question. When exactly was his grace period? Admittedly, even the most cynical among us aren’t immune to royal wedding fever, and when he married Fergie the nation was still high on the fumes from Charles and Diana’s nuptials, so perhaps he was briefly popular in 1986. But other than that? Pretty confident recollections wouldn’t vary here. Nada.

 

So technically we can’t call the events that have transpired since that brief moment in the sun a fall from grace. It’s more accurate to classify them as many falls from “meh”.

 

With that in mind, it is genuinely baffling that there are still any conversations at all about Andrew returning to royal life, especially when many think Harry should be locked in a tower just for daring to pursue an alternative future. Yet the discussion has somehow rumbled on. Now, with the death of Virginia Giuffre, it must stop for good.

 

When Giuffre alleged that she had been sexually assaulted by Andrew on three occasions when she was 17, he promised to fight to clear his name in court. His lawyer described her accusation as “baseless” and claimed she was seeking a “payday”.

 

Andrew went on to settle out of court in the US civil case for an estimated $12m, while making no admission of guilt. His lawyer declined to comment. David Boies, representing Giuffre, said of the settlement: “I believe the event speaks for itself.”

 

The teenager had been recruited to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring by Ghislaine Maxwell in 2000 while working as a locker-room attendant at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach. Giuffre told the Miami Herald: “Before you know it, I’m being lent out to politicians and academics and royalty.” In a later interview with the BBC, she chillingly described being “passed around like a platter of fruit”.

 

Last weekend, her family announced that she had “lost her life to suicide, after being a lifelong victim of sexual abuse and sex trafficking. In the end, the toll of the abuse is so heavy that it became unbearable for Virginia to handle its weight.”

 

With a few jaw-dropping exceptions, when it comes to royal scandals we don’t usually hear from the royal at the centre of the storm: never complain, never explain, and all that. But, unfortunately, thanks to his infamous Newsnight interview, we’re under no illusions about the precise level of remorse Andrew feels for his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, which continued after Epstein was convicted and sentenced to eighteen months in prison in 2008, for procuring a minor for prostitution. Remember, as Andrew said in that interview, the only thing he’s guilty of is a “tendency to be too honourable”.

 

The mea non culpa also showcased Andrew’s superpowers: a staggering degree of tone-deafness and complete illiteracy when it comes to reading rooms. As producer Sam McAlister revealed in the aftermath: “As the interview ended, and I looked at the floor, unable to comprehend what we’d just witnessed, it became clear that Prince Andrew actually thought it had gone well. Very well … Those historic photos of him and Emily [Maitlis] walking in the palace corridors that you saw? Taken after that terrible interview took place … You can see how well he thought it had gone.”

 

It’s the same story every time he pops back up, cold sore-style and just as welcome. From when he bowled down the aisle with the late Queen, unselfconsciously centre stage, at Prince Philip’s memorial in 2022, to most recently at a public appearance at an Easter church service in Windsor. (His first since the furore over his links with businessman Yang Tengbo, accused of being a Chinese spy.)

 

Whenever we see Andrew, his expression is that of a dog who’s not bothering to beg for a treat because he’s so certain it’s coming his way. “Ugh, haven’t I waited long enough?” drips from every pore. Sorry, would drip from every pore, if only that were medically possible.

 

Never being allowed back to royal duties, into the spotlight he so clearly relishes, means he will spend the rest of his days languishing in the lap of luxury. As punishments go, it’s hardly harsh. But there is a sting in the tail. It’s highly likely Andrew will be for ever denied the public approval he still seems to feel he is entitled to and deserves. It’s not a life sentence as most of us understand it, and it’s certainly nowhere close to the one Virginia Giuffre endured, but at least it’s not nothing.

 

 Polly Hudson is a freelance writer


Thursday, 1 May 2025

MOON - Woven With Northern Soul


https://www.abrahammoon.co.uk/

 

We are currently only able to ship within the UK for online orders of both samples & fabrics.

For international trade enquiries, please email customerservice@moons.co.uk.

 


ABOUT US

Founded in 1837 and with our roots in apparel, we are one of the last remaining vertical woollen mills in Great Britain, with a reputation for consistent quality and innovative design. Here you can discover more about the Abraham Moon mill, our illustrious company history, and the many natural benefits of wool fabrics.

 




COMPANY HISTORY

Our company's fine history is just one of many features that come together to make Abraham Moon products extra special, and is something we're rightfully proud of. From supplying fabric for a growing Leeds market throughout the 1800's to supplying the major fashion houses of modern times, this rich tapestry all comes together to create quite a story over the past 180 years.

 

FROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS TO INTERNATIONAL RENOWN

1837 - A memorable year in at least 2 respects. It was the year in which Queen Victoria succeeded to the British throne and it was also the year in which Abraham Moon & Sons was founded.

 

Abraham Moon, a considerable standing in the community of Guiseley, on the Northern fringes of Leeds and the Southern fringes of the Yorkshire Dales, supplied many local families with yarn to weave cloth on hand looms in their homes. When the cloth was woven he would collect the pieces, paying the weavers for their work. The cloth was then scoured (washed) locally and hung out to dry in the surrounding fields. Abraham would then transport the pieces by horse and cart to Leeds for sale in the market.

 

 1868 - Abraham had a three storey mill built on Netherfield Road in Guiseley, less than 300 yards from his house at the top of Oxford Avenue. The mill had an abundant source of local water which was soft and ideal for scouring (washing) and other processes necessary in woollen manufacture. Today we still use the pure water springs underneath the mill for scouring; as manufacturing technology progresses with time it's these simple historic details that make our fabrics special.

 

The newly built railway to Leeds ran directly behind the mill which had its own sidings. This proved an invaluable form of transport both inward (wool for processing, coal for power) and outward (distribution of cloth to the expanding consumer network). The company’s records show exports to both Western Europe and Japan as early as the 1890’s.

 

 1877 - In August 1877 Abraham Moon lost his life in an accident. A report from the local newspaper at the time sets the scene:

 

“Mr Moon was attending the annual Yeadon feast in his horse-drawn carriage. When a band struck up the startled horse bolted down Henshaw Lane. Two passengers managed to jump clear and were unharmed but Mr Moon stayed in his carriage trying to calm his horse. In its panic it tried to turn into a familiar lane where there was no room for the carriage. The vehicle demolished part of a wall into which Abraham Moon was thrown. He died soon afterwards from a head injury”. The article goes on to report that the horse survived the accident!

 

After his death, Abraham’s son Isaac succeeded him in the business, which continued to flourish throughout the remainder of the Victorian era.

 

 1902 - The original multi-storey mill burned to the ground. Undeterred Isaac Moon built a much larger single storey mill. By this time the mill had become fully vertical, meaning all manufacturing processes took place on one site – from raw wool through dyeing, blending, carding, spinning, warping weaving, and finally finishing the fabrics. We are one of the very few remaining vertical woollen mills left in Great Britain today. Isaac Moon took the business forward until his death in 1909.

 

Design and pattern books which date back to the early part of the Twentieth Century tell a story in themselves. Fashion fabrics from 1900 to 1913 gradually give way to army shirting, trouserings and greatcoat cloths from 1914 which in turn are replaced by the emerging fashions of the 20s. Today designers use the old pattern books for inspiration with new designs and the re-creation of retro looks.

 

 1920 - The Moon family sold their shares in the company in order to pursue other interests. The shares were purchased by Charles H Walsh who was both designer and mill manager at the time with the borrowed sum of £33,000, the equivalent of £1.25m today. Charles' death in 1924 saw the company passed onto his son Frank, who was already in the business.

 

1954 - Frank’s nephew Arthur took control, only retiring as chairman in 2010. The current managing director is John Walsh, the fourth generation of the family which succeeded the Moon dynasty. 1952 also marked a further extension of the mill, still located at the original site on Netherfield Road, making more room for the warping and weaving of the fabrics.

 

 1990 - Throughout the 1990's, wool faced increased competition from man-made fabric. While many mills tried (and failed) to compete on price, Moon focused on quality and concentrated on the luxury market, taking advantage of the manufacturing control and consistency that only a vertical mill can offer. Our customer list includes major international brands such as Burberry, Paul Smith, and Ralph Lauren.

 

2009 – Bronte Tweeds was purchased by Abraham Moon & Sons. Already a well-known producer of throws and tartans, the combination of Bronte's extensive market knowledge and our dedicated in-house design team and manufacturing versatility has seen our accessories division grow exponentially in the years since. Bronte Tweeds was rebranded as Bronte by Moon in 2013.

 

The showroom space was renovated from our old finishing department, where for decades our fabrics went to be steam pressed and rolled before the final quality control checks and despatch.

 


We have archive pictures of the space from even further back, 1912 in fact, when the area was used for burling and mending. You can clearly see the Victorian-era building archways and brickwork behind our new Sales & Marketing office.

 

This original building work was then extended in the 1950s, adding approximately 10m to the width of the mill on what was previously a courtyard. This is where our mill stands to this day, in close proximity to Netherfield Road.

 

Now it has been completely transformed into what you see here and below; an opportunity for us to not only give our ever-expanding product range a permanent display, but to tell the story of our unique heritage and historic craftsmanship.

 

CONTACT INFORMATION

We love to hear from you on our customer service, product range, website, or any other topics you wish to share with us. Your comments and suggestions will always be appreciated; please complete our ‘Get in Touch’ form with your feedback.

 

Our customer service team aim to respond to all messages within 24 hours; during our busier periods this may not be possible so please allow up to three working days for a reply.

 

For the address, contact number and opening hours of the Abraham Moon shops in York and Guiseley please see below:

 

YORK

33 Stonegate, York, YO1 8AW

Mon-Sat: 9am-5:30pm   Sun: 11am-5pm

 

GUISELEY

Netherfield Road, Guiseley, LS20 9HQ

 

Mon-Sat: 10am-5pm   Sun: 10am-4pm

 

 




THE FABRIC SHOP

 

Our stock supported fashion fabrics are now available online. Pick from classic best-selling tweeds in a wide range of colours from the Abraham Moon range.

 

We're pleased to provide this special cut-length service, through which our fabrics are used for all manner of projects including tailored jackets, trousers, skirts, hats, and even footwear. All Moon tweed fabrics are British made at our unique woollen mill in Guiseley, Yorkshire, where we have been crafting fine cloths with love & precision for 180 years.


Wednesday, 30 April 2025

Outrageous Barbaric ‘mindless’act / Moment historic Sycamore Gap tree is allegedly cut down


Two men filmed felling of Sycamore Gap tree during ‘mindless’ act, court hears

 

 Jury shown phone footage with sound of chainsaw and toppling tree, in trial of pair who deny criminal damage

 

 Mark Brown North of England correspondent

Tue 29 Apr 2025 14.26 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/apr/29/two-men-felled-sycamore-gap-tree-mindless-criminal-damage-court-told

 

 Two men filmed themselves using a chainsaw to fell the famous Sycamore Gap tree on Hadrian’s Wall in an act of “mindless criminal damage”, a court has heard.

 

 Daniel Graham, 39, and Adam Carruthers, 32, embarked on a “moronic mission” to cut down in minutes a tree that had stood for more than 100 years, the prosecutor Richard Wright KC told Newcastle crown court.

 

 The two men, from Cumbria, have denied two charges of criminally damaging the tree and Hadrian’s Wall, where it stood.

 

 Wright said the tree had been in a dip in the wall in Northumberland national park. It had become “a famous site, reproduced countless times in photographs, feature films and art”, he said.

 

 Graham and Carruthers travelled in Graham’s Range Rover from Cumbria in the late hours of 27 September 2023, the court heard.

 

 “By sunrise on Thursday September 28, the tree had been deliberately felled with a chainsaw in an act of deliberate and mindless criminal damage,” Wright said. “It fell on to a section of Hadrian’s Wall, causing irreparable damage to the tree itself and further damage to the wall.”

 

 Wright said the people responsible were Graham and Carruthers, who, in the technique they used, showed “expertise and a determined, deliberate approach” to the felling.

 

 He said: “First, they marked the intended cut with silver spray paint, before cutting out a wedge that would dictate the direction in which the tree would fall. One of the men then cut across the trunk, causing the sycamore to fall, hitting the wall. Whilst he did that, the other man filmed it, filmed the act on Daniel Graham’s mobile telephone.”

 

 The jury was shown the phone footage, lasting two minutes 40 seconds, in which the chainsaw and the sound of the tree toppling can be heard and the silhouette of a figure using the saw can be seen.

 

 The wedge was put in the boot of Graham’s Range Rover – “perhaps a trophy taken from the scene, to remind them of their actions. Actions they appear to have been revelling in,” Wright said.

 

 “During that return journey Mr Carruthers received a video of his young child from his partner. He replied to her: ‘I’ve got a better video than that.’ Minutes later the video of the felling of the tree was sent from Graham’s phone to Carruthers’ phone.

 

 “At the time of that text conversation the only people in the world who knew that the tree had been felled were the men who had cut it down.”

 

 The next day the world’s media began reporting on the tree’s felling and the two men shared social media posts, Wright said, with Graham messaging Carruthers: “Here we go.”

 

 Wright said Carruthers sent Graham a Facebook post from a man called Kevin Hartness saying: “Some weak people that walk this earth … disgusting behaviour.”

 

 Two minutes later Graham replied to Carruthers with a voice note saying: “That Kevin Hartness comment. Weak … fucking weak? Does he realise how heavy shit is?”

 

 Carruthers replied with his own voice note saying: “I’d like to see Kevin Hartness launch an operation like we did last night … I don’t think he’s got the minerals.”

 

 Wright said this was “the clearest confirmation, in their own voices, that Carruthers and Graham were both responsible for the deliberate felling of the tree and the subsequent damage to Hadrian’s Wall.”

 

 The prosecutor said messages between the two men talked about the felling of Sycamore Gap going “wild” and “viral”. Wright said: “They are loving it, they’re revelling in it. This is the reaction of the people that did it. They still think it’s funny, or clever, or big.”

 

 Carruthers and Graham were once good friends, the jury was told, but not now. “That once close friendship has seemingly completely unravelled, perhaps as the public revulsion at their behaviour became clear to them,” Wright said. He said each man may now be trying to blame the other.

 

 Graham, of Carlisle, and Carruthers, of Wigton, are jointly charged with causing criminal damage worth £622,191 to the tree. They are also charged with causing £1,144 of damage to Hadrian’s Wall, a Unesco world heritage site. The wall and the tree belong to the National Trust.

 

 Graham and Carruthers deny all the charges against them.

 

 The trial continues.


Tuesday, 29 April 2025

2013 Awards Celebration - Gretchen Dow Simpson / Gretchen Dow Simpson, Creator of New Yorker Covers, Dies at 85


Gretchen Dow Simpson, Creator of New Yorker Covers, Dies at 85

 

A Massachusetts native, she painted geometrically precise images of rural and seaside New England dwellings that found fans among the storied magazine’s ardent readers.

 

Alex Williams

By Alex Williams

April 25, 2025, 5:02 a.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/arts/gretchen-dow-simpson-dead.html

 

Gretchen Dow Simpson, an acclaimed Rhode Island painter whose moody, highly geometric images of seaside cottages, snow-covered farms and other totems of New England life drew comparisons to Edward Hopper and graced the covers of 58 issues of The New Yorker, died on April 11 at her home in Providence, R.I. She was 85.

 

The cause was complications of Lewy body dementia, her daughter Megan Wolff said.

 

Ms. Simpson was best known for her meditative images of the seaside and country architecture of the Northeastern seaboard — “those rather Protestant exteriors and interiors that Edward Hopper was so taken with,” Carl Little wrote in 1997 in reviewing a Manhattan exhibition of her work for Art in America.

 

While modest, solitary buildings were often her subject matter, Ms. Simpson's work was not purely representational. A former commercial photographer, she applied a telephoto approach to many of her paintings, zooming in on windows, doorways or rooftops to emphasize the juxtaposed angles and intersecting lines that characterized her work, giving it the feel of abstract art.

 

As ARTnews noted in a 1995 review of an exhibition of her paintings, Ms. Simpson’s “emphasis on the solid geometry of the buildings as well as the planar geometry of surface decoration is further enlivened by the strong contrasts of light and shadow.”

 

Her style became so recognizable that in 1993, Absolut Vodka included it in its celebrated series of print advertisements featuring the distinctive shape of its bottle in a series of playful themes, like the work of Andy Warhol or the sparkling swimming pools of Los Angeles. The “Absolut Dow Simpson” ad, which fittingly ran on the back cover of The New Yorker, featured a haunting late-afternoon shadow in the shape of the bottle, cast upon a white clapboard wall.

 

Over the years, Ms. Simpson’s work was commissioned by The Atlantic Monthly (now The Atlantic), New York magazine and other publications, and featured in solo exhibitions in New England and New York City. But it was her two-decade run producing cover paintings for The New Yorker that most shaped her legacy.

 

Even so, it took her almost a decade to break through. As she recounted on a 2011 radio program, she had been receiving rejection notes from the magazine for nine years before the art director, Lee Lorenz, called her into a meeting in 1974.

 

As for the subject matter, she recalled, Mr. Lorenz told her, “Paint what you like, not what you think we would like.” She ended up snapping a photograph of the hallway of a friend’s apartment, which had an arched doorway, and using it as the basis of her first New Yorker painting, which appeared on the cover of the Aug. 19, 1974, issue.

 

Ms. Simpson went on to produce 57 more covers for The New Yorker, attracting fan mail from readers around the country. “They react in such a personal way that they write me letters telling me details about their family life,” she said in an interview with the magazine. “They’re practically inviting me to come in and eat the leftovers from their icebox.”

 

Gretchen Hansell Dow was born on May 17, 1939, in Cambridge, Mass., the eldest of four children of Richard Dow, the director of a real estate firm, and Elizabeth (Sagendorph) Dow.

 

After graduating from the Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, Mass., in 1957, she spent two years studying painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. She then moved to New York City, where she worked as a photographer at an advertising agency while pursuing her artistic ambitions.

 

In 1968, she married John Simpson Jr., an actor, and the next year they moved to Waverly, Pa., near Scranton, where Ms. Simpson spent afternoons painting in a converted barn studio. The couple had two daughters before divorcing in 1982. Ms. Simpson settled in Providence in 1987.

In 1989, just before her 50th birthday, Ms. Simpson tallied her 50th New Yorker cover, a close-up image of gold and silver dance shoes. It was a sly tribute to her midlife turn as a competitive ballroom dancer, whirling her six-foot-tall frame around the floor to achieve mastery in the fox trot, the tango, the cha-cha and other dances.

 

While she “hadn’t done much dancing since my coming-out cotillion in Boston,” she said in a 1989 interview with The New York Times, she found satisfaction in dancing as both art and exercise. “Jogging bores me, aerobics gives me a headache, tennis is too social and squash too claustrophobic,” she added. “With ballroom dancing, you’re using every muscle and along with that you have the plus of glamour and illusion.”

 

In 2013, at age 73, Ms. Simpson married again, to James Baird, a retired Brown University chemistry professor. He survives her. Over the years, she unveiled a number of murals in Pawtucket, R.I., including a giant one on Interstate 95 of the interior of an industrial building. It’s still there today.

 

In addition to her husband and her daughter Megan, Ms. Simpson is survived by her other daughter, Phoebe Bean, and four grandchildren.

 

Her long run at The New Yorker ended in 1993, the year after Tina Brown, the swashbuckling former editor of Vanity Fair, took over and ushered in a series of sweeping changes, including more topical and gag covers in place of the traditional stately ones that had served as artworks in their own right.

 

As Ms. Simpson later recalled, Ms. Brown “did buy one painting to be used as a cover, but only because it reminded her of her own property in the Hamptons.”

 

Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.


Monday, 28 April 2025

The Zonnetje‘ is going down / It makes me sick’: the Amsterdam shops closing because of soaring rents

 




‘It makes me sick’: the Amsterdam shops closing because of soaring rents

 

As Dutch capital prepares to celebrate 750th anniversary, small business owners fear for independent retail

 

Jennifer Rankin

Jennifer Rankin in Amsterdam

Sun 27 Apr 2025 05.00 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/27/it-makes-me-sick-the-amsterdam-shops-closing-because-of-soaring-rents

 

The floral perfume of tea and coffee fills the air in ‘t Zonnetje (The Sun), as – behind the counter – Marie-Louise Velder weighs out loose leaf tea, parcelling black leaves into paper packets. Mahogany-coloured shelves are stacked with pots containing beans from Ethiopia, Java, India, alongside bric-a-brac, such as vintage tea tins and old master-style pictures.

 

But in less than two months, the sun will set for good on this cosy shop in Amsterdam, which was founded in 1642. For the owner, the rent is just too high.

 

Velder, an energetic 76-year-old, who took over the business 26 years ago from an English family, paid 975 guilders (about €440 or £376) rent a month in 1999. Now she expects a monthly bill of up to €4,500, backdated to last September, after a legal dispute with her landlord. That was reduced from €6,000 by an independent arbiter, but still represents a hefty increase on the €3,000 she pays now.

 

“It makes me sick, that’s all I can say,” she said over a cup of Ceylon tea. Traditional shops, she said, “are all dying” because of soaring rents.

 

Since the Amsterdam-based newspaper Het Parool revealed the closure last week, she said she had received a huge response from customers – “love, only love”.

 

As another independent shop closes, fears are growing that the city will be increasingly dominated by chain stores and shops catering to tourists.

 

Johannes Wilhelm, a 63-year-old local businessman, who had cycled over for some lapsang souchong, described ‘t Zonnetje’s imminent disappearance as a real pity. “There are a lot of cheese and Nutella-pancakes and all kinds of tourist shops. Tourists are fine [and] good. But this should be here as well,” he said.

 

Rents have been growing in the “most sought after high street retail locations” across the Netherlands, according to one market analyst.

 

Although the future of the shop site is uncertain, Karel Loeff, the director of the conservation organisation Heemschut, has observed that higher rents tend to mean bigger companies with more standardised offers move in when sole traders move out.

 

Founded in 1642, the shop on Haarlemmerdijk began by selling herbs, coal and buckets of water, but as the Dutch empire prospered it offered tea and coffee.

 

In the modern shop, Velder makes Earl Grey in the chilly basement by steeping Assam leaves in bergamot for three days, a blend that took two and a half years to perfect. She once sold 350 varieties of tea, but her offer is sharply reduced as she runs down her stock.

 

Loeff said preserving living heritage – one of the aims of Heemschut – was very hard.

 

“We can preserve the wooden beams and shelves … but we can’t preserve a function. We can’t say this is an original tea shop and you should preserve this for the future.”

 

Local shops run by private owners for decades “are what make cities unique”, he continued. “If you push them away and you only have standard brands and shops, the attractiveness of the city disappears.”

 

Amsterdam has been grappling for years with how to preserve its heritage in the face of increasing numbers of homogenous chain stores and tourist-friendly novelty shops selling sweets or rubber ducks in the historic centre. In 2017, the city government announced that retailers catering mainly to tourists, such as bike-rental companies or cheese shops, would be prevented from opening in parts of the city centre.

 

Iris Hagemans, an urban geographer at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, cautioned about generalising. Amsterdam has places where tourism has created a “monoculture in the shopping landscape”, she said, citing the congested central Damstraat. But just a few hundred metres away “the atmosphere is completely different” and shops confronted with dwindling demand from residents and competition from online shopping are benefiting from tourist footfall. “I think this monoculture is sometimes portrayed as a kind of oil spill that will eventually spread throughout the city, but the effect is much more local.”

 

Government support for independent businesses, such as intervention to control commercial rents, was a tricky area, she said. “There can be quite a big gap between the type of shops that people claim to want to see in their neighbourhood and … the kind of shop that they actually frequent … I think there’s a risk there of supporting a function for which there is not really a demand.”

 

Hagemans favours government action to protect basic needs, such as access to healthy food, healthcare and other essential services, but cautions against the state as an arbiter of taste. “The retail landscape should be able to respond to the market and be dynamic. And it’s democratic in the way that you vote with your wallet.”

 

Down the road from ‘t Zonnetje, near a pizza joint and lemonade shop, a banner has gone up to mark the 750th anniversary of Amsterdam, which falls in October. Velder has heard there are plans afoot to support small business owners in this anniversary year, “but it is too late for me”.