I received excellent news today: I’m to pay a fine of €20.

I’m not kidding, this is excellent news. I’d expected to have to fork out much more.

I’ve written about the incident in question elsewhere, so I won’t go into all that again (it was a particularly pointless and petty piece of bureaucratic nonsense which tends to get me a bit steamed up). The important point is that date of that entry: late March. Just over six months ago. Which means that in principle the fine should have gone up twice in the interim, bloating like a rotting fruit with each increase worsening the splatter to come when it inevitably falls from the tree.

Ahem. You might ask, then, why I didn’t pay the damn thing? Well, the situation was a bit complicated. I was still officially registered in Zaandam, so that’s the address they sent the bill to. To a house which in the interim was pulled down. And then by the time I had a new legal address, the rot had set in to the point that I was too terrified of the fallout to even prod the damn thing gently to assess the danger, let alone actually shake the tree and make it fall.

But today’s post brought the bill, to my new address — it seems the wheels of authority grind even more slowly than I would have expected (I’ve been registered here for two months now). And the relocation seems to have magically reset the countdown, so all that remains is the original (pointless and petty, but small) fine.

I never would have thought I’d be so happy to pay the Justitie 20 €.