Last October, my son and I went for a Dark Sky weekend on Terschelling. An astronomer gave a talk about the universe, and afterwards we went outside to gaze at the stars. It was really splendid! A few weeks earlier, I’d prepared by leafing through my old Royal Netherlands Navy astronomy lecture notes. I realised just how many different kinds of time there are. Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the most important, of course, but let’s not forget sidereal time, solar time, local mean time, and true time. The pension fund is also concerned with time – specifically, the length of time. The fund looks back and forward 60 years to determine our pension scheme’s investment strategies. January marked the start of a new era, when the fund switched to the new pension system. I can count on a good pension in 2027. That’s something to look forward to. As I get older, I find myself thinking back to the past more and more often, to my time on board. In 1990, we arrived in Tripoli, Libya, to unload a consignment of apples from Turkey. That was Libya under the dictator Gaddafi. Customs clearance was strict, but it wasn’t corrupt like in neighbouring countries. We were given passes to go on shore, and we spent an afternoon strolling around the city. Tripoli made a clean and wealthy impression, quite different to Algiers or Alexandria, ports in neighbouring countries where we also often called.

The next day, I was visited on board by a manager from the agency that looked after the interests of our ship. While enjoying a glass of orange juice, he listed the vices of the West, and he went on to talk about the beneficial nature of Gaddafi’s ideas, which he said would drastically change life in Europe. Now, I’m not averse to a bit of a debate, so I told him that Europe wouldn’t just let itself be brushed aside. In 2011, Gaddafi was killed during the Arab Spring disturbances. I wonder how things turned out for that manager? Fortunately, things are different for our pension fund. The fund is seeking to define a sensible strategy for the future. Not on the basis of ideology or dictates, but through consultation and separate from the buzzword of the moment. So far, that’s been going well. The Executive Board determines the strategy in consultation with the Pension Council, the Supervisory Board, and all the staff. So there aren’t any dictates. It reminds me of my personal war hero, the Normandy veteran Captain Herman Heida, with whom I had the privilege of serving in 1980. He once said: ‘Hope, time and luck are available in abundance, but misery and despair are in short supply.’ Perhaps that’s the essence of how to deal with time: be patient and keep things in perspective. Let’s stick to that approach! ←