• Thursday, 3 Jul 2025 10:04 pm

  London: Houses of Parliament

  On the train down a load of old folks get on the train. One of them is reading a book called “A Brief History of the Countryside in 100 Objects”, which sounds like the quintessential old person book.

  The train rolls into Kings Cross eventually and we disembark and wander down into the Underground. Whenever I come to London I marvel at how quickly I readopt the language of city living. We dive into the bowels of the city and board the Victoria Line to Oxford Circus.

  Back on the streets we weave through polyglot crowds towards Buckingham Palace. The palace is demure and the crowds outside are restless and wandering. We cross the street and snap a couple of pics of the Victoria Monument and then head down a treelined road past the Kings Guard Museum towards Westminster.

  

  In Westminster we find a row of three red-painted English phone boxes, at each of which is a queue some 50 people long waiting to take pictures with the phone box. I guess these phone boxes must be the most optimally-placed for tourist photography because the Elizabeth Tower of the Houses of Parliament is sort of in the background. I've always thought the most British phone boxes are the old BT cornet-labelled ones standing solitary at the foot of Cross Fell filled with forgotten books. But: NOT BRITISH ENUF. At one phone box, a 14-year-old tries on a series of modelesque facial expressions, shifting hipshot from one side to the other. At the next, a Buddhist in burgundy robes and sandals stands stockstill with the door of the phone box half-open, as if he's Buddhist Clark Kent or something.

  We wind through crowds past Westminster Hall and spot the visitors' entrance to the Houses of Parliament. There is no queue, no fanfare. No one seems to have noticed. I wander through the fences towards one of the security personnel. Behind them stands a man with an automatic rifle braced against his hip. I half expect him to raise his NATO-issue bullpup and start yelling at me. He doesn't.

  I ask the security guy whether there are any more tours of the House of Commons on today. He says no, but they’re currently debating and we can go in and watch if we want. Perks of being British. I duly shrug off my backpack for a security check and then we’re in the medieval Westmister Hall under the centuries-old roofs and standing on the spot where Charles I was marked for execution.

  

  

  I feel very much as if we’ve discovered a secret shortcut into the heart of British politics.

  Up past St. Stephen’s Porch and into St. Stephen’s Hall, where linger school groups on excursion and, at intervals, women standing with extraordinarily well-behaved dogs. (These dogs, as it turns out, have all won awards for one thing or another; non-award-winning dogs are not allowed in the Houses of Parliament.)

  We wait ten or fifteen minutes and then are ushered through the Central Hall (featuring: a Post Office!) into a series of corridors and up flights of stairs to the mezzanine supporting the public viewing area for the House of Commons. We render our bags unto a surprisingly sassy man in a morning suit and suddenly we’re in the House of Commons, looking down through a pane of plexiglas at a couple dozen Members of Parliament debating compensation for Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI) women.

  My brief comments on the debate: the Tories presented better rhetorically, but I struggle to find sympathy for the economic cause of a group of 70-year-old women who benefitted directly from one of the strongest periods of economic growth in the history of Britain, and whose main complaint is that they couldn’t be bothered to read their own mail.

  This opinion, I suspect, wouldn't go over well with the half dozen WASPI women sitting two rows above us, who cry, "Hear hear!" when the Tories speak, and who cry "Shame shame!" when Labour speaks.

  A little ways down from the WASPI women, a couple of teenagers snap their fingers (i.e. like "oh snap" from circa 2006) when Torsten Bell says something spicy. The sassy man in the morning suit comes down out of nowhere and scolds them: "Stop doing that with your arm." The teenagers leave a couple of minutes later.

  

  From Parliament we wander down past Downing Street, where I'm disappointed to discover that Number 10 isn’t even visible from Whitehall Road. Then on to Charing Cross station and back into the depths of the earth for a ride up to Islington to check in to our lodging.

  

  Refreshed, we strike back out towards Pentonville (of the famous HMP) for dinner at Little Georgia on Barnsbury Road. What a fantastic little spot! I get a chkmeruli and Sam gets a bean stew; a bit of cake and a glass of dessert wine finish us off.

  We walk slowly back to the hotel via the Uniqlo and the Regent’s Canal and pass out at like 8:30 pm.

  

  London 2025 London Travel

• ---

  Friday, 27 Jun 2025 9:15 pm

  C2A: Amsterdam, finally

  Sam isn't feeling well in the morning so we ride together down to the Gouda station and I see her onto a train that will take her into Amsterdam. There are some disruptions due to someone stealing cable on the train lines, so it takes her longer than the expected 15 minutes.

  I turn around and head north out of the city. There's a stiff crosswind blowing out over the Reeuwijk ponds, the result of peat overharvesting. These days it's amply serviced by the leisure watercraft industry. I cross the Old Rhine, (Oude Rijn), much diminished, in Bodegraven, then push on through the fields and canals to Nieuwkoop. I pass a lock: a first; I thought all the water was basically at the same level around here.

  

  Big houses line the road in Nieuwkoop, with a little canal between the road and the front garden. There are little rowboats moored up between the lilypads, with water easements leading out onto the lakes behind the houses. I wonder how far one could travel by water alone. Probably pretty far, although I guess rights of way could get tricky.

  

  I skirt Zevenhoven and then enter the sprawling industrial parks east of Schipol. A couple of airplanes take off and bank over my head; I try to get video but keep turning up like 5 seconds too late. I take a bridge over a highway and feel like I can see the entire country laid out before me. Man it's flat in the Netherlands.

  Soon I'm riding through Amstelveen, which I suppose must be where all the rich people in Amsterdam live, judging by the number of Mercedes and Audis I see in the gravel drives abutting the enormous houses lining the road here. Then I arrive at the Amsterdamse Bos country park, but the cyclepath is closed so I follow a woman on a cargo bike up the main street towards the Amsterdam ring road. She easily outpaces me. I tell myself it's because she has a battery and I'm carrying two tents.

  

  On the other side of the ring road I join a gaggle of cyclists heading up into town, but I peel off towards the museum and the tourist quarter with a painter on a bike. All of his kit is in a little tray attached to the back of his bakfiets; his brushes are in a case he wears on his back. I think it's just terrific, even if he's way faster than I am. He nearly obliterates a little tourist boy who wanders into the bike path. His grandmother pulls the boy back; the painter doesn't react at all: no swerve, no flinch, no look. Just keeps on riding. I eat his dust as we ride through the museum itself.

  

  On the far side, I cross a bridge and suddenly I'm in the thick of it. There are people everywhere: Portugese women walking in groups, German families with maps, Americans on orange rental bicycles pulling out into traffic without looking. I have to make an emergency stop in front of a lady who pulls crosswise into the cyclepath; I hear her boyfriend say, "I always tell you to look both ways," in a tone that indicates he's an insufferable person to spend time with. I follow the lines that the locals take and sneer at a group of men in tight trousers, all of whom have their phone out, debating loudly which way it is to the sex museum. I feel a totally unearned sense of superiority, high up on my tourist bike.

  Sam calls and tells me that due to the cable theft problem, she's been held up at the previous station. I ride under the central station, which smells powerfully of urine, and along the quayside, down to where Sam's waiting for me. I find her sitting on a wall with her head in her hands.

  We're both mighty hungry so we head across the street for some food and a last Nice Beer before making our way out to the ferry by train. It's a short ride on the train from Amsterdam to Driehuis, and the train's empty; and then it's a short ride from Driehuis out to IJmuiden, where the ferry is waiting. We collect our ticket and take our bikes up onto the boat and leash them to the bulkhead. There are six or seven other bicycles on the boat with us: tourists heading up to Scotland maybe.

  We head up a deck or two and find our cabin and then I immediately fall asleep.

  

  Cally2Ammy Cycling Netherlands

• ---

  Wednesday, 25 Jun 2025 2:10 pm

  Tinkers

  by Paul Harding

  Published 2009 191 pages

  

  Tinkers is a character study of a father and son from the perspective of the son on his deathbed. The father, Howard Crosby, is a travelling salesman in the early years of the 20th century, an ineffective sort of a guy with epilepsy and a powerful curiosity about the world around him and a wife that barely tolerates him.

  His son, George, is a horologist on his deathbed, looking back on his childhood, his father’s life, and his own experiences with his troubled siblings.

  The book alternates modes throughout, from first to third person and from present to past tense. There are sections of seemingly incongruous extracts from books or pamphlets. There are long run-on sentences that I think are meant to sound profound. And there are images that are evocative but incongruous, like a description of a fat man as a “fleshy Olympian pear” or of roadside puddles as the colour of “iron cream”. What the heck is iron cream? Some of the descriptions run on like a fanfic writer who can’t decide on the best way to bring an image to life and so just keeps heaping new ones on.

  I finished the book with the powerful sense that Paul Harding is a clever guy with a lot of novel ways to describe things. But I also finished the book with a powerful exhaustion with sentences like these:

  Buy the pendant, sneak it into your hand from the folds of your dress and let the low light of the fire lap at it late at night as you wait for the roof to give out or your will to snap and the ice to be too thick to chop through with the ax as you stand in your husband's boots on the frozen lake at midnight, the dry hack of the blade on ice so tiny under the wheeling and frozen stars, the soundproof lid of heaven, that your husband would never stir from his sleep in the cabin across the ice, would never hear and come running, half-frozen, in only his union suit, to save you from chopping a hole in the ice and sliding into it as if it were a blue vein, sliding down into the black, silty bottom of the lake, where you would see nothing, would perhaps feel only the stir of some somnolent fish in the murk as the plunge of you in your wool dress and the big boots disturbed it from its sluggish winter dreams of ancient seas. Maybe you would not even feel that, as you struggled in clothes that felt like cooling tar, and as you slowed, calmed, even, and opened your eyes and looked for a pulse of silver, an imbrication of scales, and as you closed your eyes again and felt their lids turn to slippery, ichthyic skin, the blood behind them suddenly cold, and as you found yourself not caring, wanting, finally, to rest, finally wanting nothing more than the sudden, new, simple hum threading between your eyes. The ice is far too thick to chop through. You will never do it.

• ---

  Tuesday, 24 Jun 2025 10:45 pm

  The Yearling

  by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

  Published 1938 428 pages

  

  The Yearling is the perfect example of a certain kind of story written in the first half of the twentieth century that got turned into a hundred million movies starring Gregory Peck. It’s the quintessential example of a bildungsroman set in the American south. It’s got man vs. wild. It’s got boy vs. wild. It’s got boy + wild. It’s got fathers and sons. It’s got grimy scallywag types. It’s got language you can sink your teeth into. It’s got a character arc that you can see the whole thing right from the very beginning. It’s got no black people. It’s got absolutely zero tension. This is the America that they want to make great again.

  The Yearling is the story of Penny Baxter, a pioneer in the Central Florida backwoods (specifically around Ocala) in the years after the American Civil War. The story is told from the perspective of his son, Jody, who is the eponymous yearling, over the course of a single year as Jody grows from a boy to a young man. Penny and Jody navigate difficult relationships with their neighbours, torrential rains, death of close friends, and skirmishes from the wildlife that threaten their existence in the scrub. However, as I say: no tension. Penny is clever and moral and a solution is never far away.

  You may have been told that the yearling of the title actually represents a young fawn that Jody adopts midway through the story, and who grows along with him over the course of the year. That’s just a clever rhetorical technique. I won’t spoil anything here but this book was written in 1938 and won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted for the screen like 8 times, so I think you can see where this story with the fawn goes.

  It’s a little trite, and it’s a little predictable, but the world that Rawlings conjures up is so rich you can almost sink your fingers into it. The blackjack oaks and the sand and the split-rail fences and the long beards and the critters. And the food — almost Ghibli-esque in its detail. Tell me you don’t want to sit down to this table:

  She ladled food into pans big enough to wash in. The long trenchered table was covered with steam. There were dried cow-peas boiled with white bacon, a haunch of roast venison, a platter of fried squirrel, swamp cabbage, big hominy, biscuits, cornbread, syrup and coffee. A raisin pudding waited at the side of the hearth.

  “If I’d of knowed you was comin’,” she said, “I’d of cooked somethin’ fitten. Well, draw up.”

  Or this description of killing a deer, which lays forth the brutality of the wild in such few words:

  He took his knife from its scabbard and went to the deer and slit its throat. It died with the quiet of a thing to whom death is only one short step beyond a present misery.

  Why can’t we write like this anymore?

  Stray observations

  • The edition that I read (pub. Heinemann, 1969), besides having perhaps the perfectly broken spine, also featured these fantastic engraved illustrations at the start of every chapter:

  

• ---

  Tuesday, 24 Jun 2025 9:47 pm

  C2A: Into the Real Netherlands

  The area around Standaarbuiten and Moerdijk seems to be one sprawling industrial/farming estate. Long stock-straight rows of potatoes on one side, idling lorries and docking bays on the other. Just beyond, a set of bridges and new housing estates. The houses are manicured and stylish, and a few of them confusingly have thatched roofs? Canals start to wind their way amid the fields on the way out to Hollands Diep.

  We’re entering the Real Netherlands.

  We pass through a sleepy town called Zevenbergen and then a village called Moerdijk, where the locals mounted a resistance to the invading Nazis who sought to control the Hollands Diep estuary. On both sides of the estuary there are the remnants of lines of concrete bunkers, placed by the Germans as defense and now scrawled with graffiti about love and totally caved in with dirt and nettles. We climb a hill on the far side of the town and find, at the top of the hill, the Hollands Diep itself, broad and roaring with traffic.

  This is not the first time that we find rivers at the top of hills. (The hills are, it scarcely needs to be said, actually embankments keeping the North Sea out of the country.)

  We cross the Moerdijk bridge into Zuid-Holland and the cut through the fields to the south side of Dordrecht. The suburbs are quiet and green and launch us with very little fanfare into the heart of the town, where we stop at Nobel Brood for a bit of brunch. I get a kanelbulle, which transports me directly back to Sweden a couple of years ago (although it’s nowhere near the real thing). Then we board our first waterbus across the Oude Maas: a pound each saves us going back on ourselves to cross the river via bridge.

  

  On the way out of Dordrecht we pass through a type of residential area I’ve never seen before: houses on narrow islands abutting a tiny canal. There are gardens watered by the canal and little canoes moored at wooden decks, all abutting a cyclepath frequented almost entirely by girls in baggy jeans and pensioners in wraparound sunglasses. It seems somehow so idyllic. And then we climb a hill and find another canal crossing the previous one at a higher level than all of the houses.

  

  

  We turn off and make our way through Nieuw-Lekkerland to catch our second waterbus of the day across the Lek. We time it perfectly and fly out of Lekkerkerk with the wind behind us.

  From here it just gets more Dutch. On both sides now are long, narrow patches of grass, sometimes with cows or sheep or goats, sometimes with a couple of lapwings or seagulls, alternating with long rows of water, only a couple of inches below the land. I don’t know how the whole thing doesn’t flood under rain. There has got to be some serieus engineering at work here.

  

  

  We fly past kids coming home from school, pitying their battle against 20 kph headwinds, before rolling into Gouda and joining the rush hour bike traffic. Sitting in a queue of bikes at a traffic light makes me feel extremely smug.

  Eventually we arrive at the summerhouse where we’re staying for the night. It’s rustic and cosy in perfect proportions, so we settle in. I make a quick run to the shop for groceries on my bike. I think I could make a good Dutch person, if only I could learn the language.

  Cally2Ammy Cycling Netherlands

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