Holland - The Netherlands - Part 1

Windmills of the mind.....

Windmills (or rather Wind Turbines) at Enkhuizen haven, the IJsselmeer behind.

Only half the Kingdom of the Netherlands is more than one metre above sea level, and eighteen per cent of its surface area is water. With a population of nearly seventeen million the number of people per square kilometre of land is nearly five hundred, which puts it up close to Bangladesh and South Korea in the population density stakes.....

Low Country: Lelystad from the Houtribdijk

It was not always so.  The Dutch Golden Age, in the 17th century, saw economic growth with the Dutch East and West India Companies creating colonies and trading posts across the globe; settlements included New Amsterdam in North America and the Cape Colony in South Africa; art and science flourished.  But after the boom came something of a bust, and from Napoleon to Hitler, despite being a constitutional monarchy since 1815 and a parliamentary democracy since 1848, the Netherlands have had their share of troubles.

Jacob van Ruisdael, View of Haarlem with bleaching grounds, 1670 - 1675

The population of The Netherlands has almost quadrupled in the last hundred years, and perhaps this has driven the extraordinary developments in land reclamation and modernisation. Despite the crowded nature of the country, it is one of the world's ten leading exporting countries and food production is its largest industry. Rotterdam is the busiest port in Europe. In addition The Netherlands is the only country which has an action plan to cope with rising sea levels due to global warming. It has a golden past, but is also thinking ahead.

View of Delft, 1660 - 1661, Johannes Vermeer

In the centre of the administrative capital, The Hague, imaginative new buildings dwarf the bars and restaurants around the Plein....

But the great conurbations are all well and good; for the moment I yearn for the sense of space that was caught by those masters of the landscape.  

Meindert Hobbema, Wooded Landscape with Cottages, 1665

Meindert Hobbema's The Avenue at Middelharnis is one of my favourite paintings in the National Gallery, London, with its extraordinary symmetry and depth.   His pictures teem with life, from people tending their gardens, to riders with their dogs, but all human activity is secondary to the immensity of the sky and the growth of the trees.  Hobbema was apparently a pupil of his friend, Jacob van Ruisdael, but the influence of the latter's uncle, Salomon van Ruysdael is also noticeable in his work.

Salomon van Ruysdael, River Landscape with Ferry, 1649

It must have been comparatively easy to walk out of Amsterdam, or Utrecht, or Leiden, and find views of rural scenes in that Golden Age. Today, apart from urbanisation, there are 139,295 kilometres of roads in the Netherlands, as well as 3,013 kilometres of rail track.  There are said to be nine million cars (and eighteen million bicycles) in the country, so finding a quiet spot is a test of initiative - but it is not impossible.....  

Church and Windmill at Loenen aan de Vecht

With so little variation in topography (the highest point in The Netherlands is little over three hundred metres above sea level) and the absence of true forest (the last original natural woods were felled in 1871) it is not easy to find an interesting landscape. Heathland, meadows, mud flats, farmlands and non-native plantations are the order of the day, but still the great painters of the past created memorable images.....

Landscape with Two Oaks, Jan van Goyen, 1641

And their more modern followers have not done so badly either.....

Lake near Loosdrecht, Willem Roelofs, 1887

Which is not far from where I find this....

Loosdrecht Lakes

And, less conventionally, this....

What has saved the landscape of The Netherlands is the presence of water.  It is everywhere, in one shape or form or another - canal, river, lake, rain, snow, ice..... Reflections of the sky in Leiden brighten the place and also add space and air.....

Elsewhere the shimmering gleam of large expanses of water and sky unite to create a feeling of liberation.....

Though there is little doubt that the addition of a mill, in this case by a one of the great modern Dutch masters, makes for a better composition.....

Oostzijdse Mill along the Gein River, 1903, Piet Mondrian

This has been a fascinating journey, in part beyond my expectations.  Initially I wanted to see where Rembrandt walked, and sketched, but in this I was thwarted by the modern world.  However, the streets of old Leiden where Rembrandt grew up are still quiet and evocative of the past......  Some of the houses like these around the Pieterskerk were where the original Pilgrim Fathers settled, escaping religious persecution in England.  From Leiden some of them, including an ancestor of Barack Obama, set sail on the Speedwell, in July 1620, to meet with the Mayflower in Plymouth before attempting to cross the Atlantic (the Speedwell had to be abandoned in Dartmouth).

In wandering across the IJsselmeer, and driving down toward Utrecht, I also came across another surprise.  A slightly dated Italian TCI guide book mentioned, in a footnote, that the village of Laren contained a small art gallery in the former home of an American couple, William and Anna Singer. Here they had built a villa, which they called Wild Swans, in 1911, and, with inheritance from his father's Pittsburgh steelworks, he started collecting paintings of the Hague School and contemporary Dutch artists.  

I was in for a further surprise, however.  With car parks overflowing and a buzzing crowd in the foyer, I was not to find the works of Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig (1866 - 1915), who painted the village pond nearby, and his contemporaries....

The Koesweerd Pond, Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig

But a major exhibition dedicated solely to the life and work of Leo Gestel (1881 - 1941) who, together with Piet Mondrian, was one of the most prominent Dutch Modernists.

Gestel spent time in Paris, and in Majorca, Germany, Italy and Flanders, and he experimented with pointillism, fauvism, cubism and futurism (among other -isms!) Several of his works depict Dutch landscapes, some in summery Cezanne-like colour....

Others in monochrome, in keeping with the current season....

But others are portraits, dazzling in their colours....

This was a surprise indeed.  We had come a long way from the Golden Age, and my intention to find and emulate the early masters had come unstuck.  It was time to withdraw, and to rest a while within the warmth and depth of a Dutch interior.  Just down the road, unnervingly on the Brink (which I am relieved to learn means the village green) we found Cafe t' Bonte Paard (The Spotted Horse), where thick pea soup and dark beer smoothed over the wrinkles of post-modernism.  

Meanwhile, out on the IJsselmeer, those windmills are still turning, patiently waiting for the next master.....

Big Garden Birdwatch

My feathered friends

Can you hear me love?

It may be a far cry from the exotic worlds so readily available today via High Definition TV, with the soft sound track of David Attenborough, but our garden is full of life, and some of it is very colourful.

It's not a big garden, and it is a little dark, with a huge laurel hedge on one side, opposite the house, and two ivy covered fences on the sides.  Some birds don't trust it, and so where we used to have jackdaws and magpies, there's now more food for the others.  

Robins are very territorial, and this one has claimed our garden for his own. He is quite fussy, and sometimes gives other species a bit of hassle, but most of the time he is pretty accommodating.

I was surprised therefore when I saw this the other day:

Which led to this:

Which could have been nasty, except that I had forgotten that sunshine means spring, and spring means making eggs, while the sun shines.  It must have been a bit of a shock when the next day it snowed!

I would love to say we get all sorts in our garden, and we do occasionally get visitors - I recently saw a female Blackcap here, who must be overwintering, but I didn't manage to get her photo, and I saw four Long-tailed tits fly over before Christmas, and we often get Coal tits in the summer - but in general the population is as you see in these pictures, all taken in the last week:

Blue tits are quite common, and they have nested here in some years, though as they are so little, I don't think their survival rate is that high....

Handsome Great tits also pop in to grab some seeds, but they are quicker to flit in and out than the little Blues.

I won't admit to having favourites, but I am very fond of the House Sparrows that are regulars at our feeders.  They may not be very tuneful, but they are sociable birds, and though perhaps a little scruffy, they can be very smart when they make the effort:

The males have fetching grey caps, and fashionable stubble:

The Hedge Sparrow, or Dunnock, is no relation, and prefers scratching about on the ground in the flower beds to dining at the feeders.  I used to think they were drab little birds, but they're not, being kitted out with a tweedy sort of suit and whispy trousers, and their agile movements and bright eyes go quite well with their extraordinary breeding habits, which effectively mean that if you have three Dunnocks in your garden you may well have at least two pairs.....

Blackbirds do well here, and their varied diet means that they are happy at the table and just as happy on the ground, where they will take worms and slugs and grubs, turning their heads so they can see what's going on (strangely they do not have parallax vision, so each eye is only covering one side).

The male stands out, with his coal black feathers and gold beak and eye rings, but the female is no less a bird, with her rich brown dapple, and she too has gold eye-liner.... 

Though if it is gold you want, then it's this little bird you want to watch.  Unlike the others the Goldfinch really only seems to like nyger seed, though in fact I see flocks of them in the fields at this time of year stripping thistles and umbelliferae of their seeds....  We have had families of these, and they always used to come to feed in pairs, but sadly, at the moment, there is only one.....

One of the most colourful birds, however, is the Starling.  When seen in their thousands at dusk, or when in flocks on farmland or strutting about on your lawn at a distance, they seem to be grey unattractive, but in fact they are shimmeringly bright with blues and speckles, the younger ones being lighter, sometimes almost fawn, the mature adults glistening with a sharp sheen.  They are acrobatic, too, and have a gift for mimicry which has even stretched to them imitating telephone rings to send humans back inside their houses!

Starlings are in decline, they say, and this is partly why the Big Garden Birdwatch is so important.  By inputting the received data, the experts in the world of ornithology can build up their knowledge of species - which are doing well, and which may need protection.  It may be great if you spot some rarity in your garden, but it is no problem if all you see is a tiny wren.  It may be spectacular to see a Red Kite circling overhead, or a Sparrow Hawk blasting past on a killing spree.  Woodpeckers and Jays are marvellous to see close up, and the glinting eyes of Magpies or the raucous voice of the Carrion Crow are things to marvel at, but this Big Garden Birdwatch is not about particulars like that; it is about mapping the commonplace, so that we can understand our everyday world a little better.  Woodpigeons may not be special, 

And I wouldn't mind putting this one in a pie, especially if he was the one who plundered my purple sprouting on my allotment, but he's welcome in our garden, pigeon toes and all!

My assistant bird watcher is particularly fond of him!

Though in fact, the birds just keep a respectful distance.....  We all get along just fine, and that, I think, is what is so wonderful about it all.....

If you go to the RSPB website https://www.rspb.org.uk/birdwatch/ you will be able to register your interest, and eventually also upload your findings.

Last year over half a million people took part, noting some seven million birds.  The following is from the webpage:

Why take part?

Bird populations are a great indicator of the health of the countryside. That's why it's so important to take part in surveys like Big Garden Birdwatch to keep an eye on the ups and downs of the wildlife where we live.

All you need to do is spend an hour over the weekend of 24-25 January counting the birds in your garden. It's that simple!

The more people involved, the more we can learn. So, grab a cuppa and together we can all help to give nature a home.

Post Script:  January 24th
Big Garden Birdwatch 

No pigeons or doves in sight, and only a couple, respectively, of the sparrows and starlings, and no great tit.......  But a wren (unfortunately I missed getting a picture) and two goldfinches!  Yay!

The Turning World

Poetry walks

Sheep may safely graze on pasture
When the shepherd guards them well.
Where rulers govern well
we may feel peace and rest
and what makes countries happy

The Turning World is the title of an anthology of poems complied by D J Brinley in 1968 when he found, as a young teacher, that there was a total lack of suitable textbooks to interest teenagers in poetry.

At my school, poetry was delivered and consumed in a variety of ways.  At an early stage we were made to memorise The Brook,  in Nigel Molesworth fashion (Peotry is sissy stuff that rhymes.) 

i come from haunts of coot and hern

i make a sudden sally

and-er-hem-er-hem-the fern

to bicker down a valley….

Down with Skool!  

Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle

Though in How to be Topp, Molesworth offers some conciliation to English teachers….

However there are other poems which creep in from time to time there is one which go

Har fleag har fleag har fleag onward

Into the er rode the 600

            There are as well lars porsena of clusium elegy in country churchyard loss of the royal george and chevy chase.  Anything to do with daffodils is also grate favourite of English masters…..

As pupils we were issued with Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, and I still have my copy – it is in remarkably good condition; rarely used, I think a bookseller might say.

So it was that when I became an English teacher myself, the compilation by Mr Brinley was most welcome (pace Palgrave – I do actually treasure it).  I doubt whether I influenced many young minds, but perhaps some of my pupils found words and rhythms in these pages to amuse or console.  I learned that at times the clarity of D H Lawrence worked well:

Climbing through the January snow, into the Lobo canyon

Dark grow the spruce-trees, blue is the balsam, water

sounds still unfrozen, and the trail is still evident.

Mountain Lion

Thomas Hardy’s Christmas: 1924 gave us something to contemplate:

‘Peace upon earth!’ was said.  We sing it,

And pay a million priests to bring it.

After two thousand years of mass

We’ve got as far as poison-gas.

At the going down of the sun...

And T.S.Eliot’s Preludes always led to sparks of creativity:

The winter evening settles down

With smells of steaks in passageways.

Six o’clock.

The burnt-out ends of smoky days….

Red Kite hunting

I did not know it then, but it was Eliot, rehearsing the word burnt, that gave my text-book its name.  In Burnt Norton, the first of  his Four Quartets, written in 1935, he wrote:

At the still point of the turning world.  Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement…..

Kestrel hunting

One time the world hangs still is the depth of winter, the short days of Christmas in the north, when time seems to stall, and days hardly get off the ground.  There is a sense, just after Christmas, that things have come to a halt; the excesses of the celebrations merge with the darkness and the world seems stuck.  Then, almost suddenly, into the New Year, and days seem to lengthen, the birds seem to sing; the air is more alive…..  Eliot’s theme of air blends with the wood smoke of Burnt Norton’s winter fires, and the dance begins again…..

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight

Even while the dust moves

There rises the hidden laughter

Of children in the foliage

Quick now, here, now, always –

Ridiculous the waste sad time

Stretching before and after.

Peotry (sic) perhaps has had its day – the young, no longer in one another’s arms (though very much online), may not have the time to decipher the codes of learned bards, but the art of composing words into shapes and lines is not yet dead.

There is a green hill....

Wordsworth gave good advice, in Up! Up! My Friend!

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:-

We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;

Close up those barren leaves;

Come forth, and bring with you a heart

That watches and receives.

O still, small voice of calm

So we walk in the turning world, watching birds making the most of air. Winter has not yet done its worst, perhaps, and fortune smiles for a day or two.  While earnest poets compete this weekend for the Poetry Book Society T S Eliot Prize, this year, the fiftieth anniversary of Eliot’s death, amounting to £20,000 for the winner and £1,500 for each of the ten short-listed competitors, we look for poetry in the landscape and wildlife around us.  

Though it is 98 years since the death of Edward Thomas, his words are still alive:

But these things also are Spring’s –

On banks by the roadside the grass

Long-dead that is greyer now

Than all the Winter it was….

While the North blows, and starling flocks

By chattering on and on

Keep their spirits up in the mist,

And Spring’s here, Winter’s not gone.

But These Things Also

The countryside is full of life, and death.  I watch the birds of prey as they scan the fields for voles, unsuspecting lives to take.  

Kestrel hovering

I watch the blackbird as he cleans his beak from wormy residues.  

We scatter flocks of starlings, 

goldfinches, 

fieldfare.  

Larks rise up in alarm, twitter and flit, then fall again to earth.  

Skylark

Pigeons strip the new shoots from the crops; 

Woodpigeon en masse

crows grasp and stab all things they can.  

In the air, flights criss and cross, from late late dawn to early dusk.  The greatest gift, perhaps, is that life goes on.

Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die.

Burnt Norton

Just as we turned for home, I caught a sequence of aerial combat that could have shown real feathers flying, but which, as if to show us how, ended in peace.

Buzzard to Base, tumbleweed, OK?

Bandit on tail

Check six

Locking on, BFM

Dive dive dive

Holding hands?

OK Kestrel, RTB

B-LOC, Bingo

A final image from these walks is these two lovebirds.  Spring is in the air! And poetry is love.....

Jack and Jill Daw

And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time

Burnt Norton

T S Eliot

However, the final final last word must be Nigel Molesworth's, as he reads to the class from The Burial Sir of Sir John Moore Sir at Corunna Sir (A titter from 2B they are wet and i will tuough them up after.)

Notadrumwasheardnotafuneralnote

shut up peason larffing

As his corse

As his corse

what is a corse sir? gosh is it

to the rampart we carried

(whisper you did not kno your voice was so lovely)

Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot.

PING!

Shut up peason i know sir he's blowing peas at me

Oer the grave where our hero was buried.

(A pause a grave bow i retire and Egad! peason hav placed a dainty pin upon mine seat. Fie!)