It seems to me there’s not much point in taking photographs while cycling in the Netherlands, for the pleasures are incidental rather than visual. The wind at your back, mild sunshine, hearing cuckoos and frogs, cycling on paths between poplars or willows, seeing ordinary wildlife so close up (including a hen and chicks crossing a road today), little brick villages with extravagant gables, the sense of moving seamlessly and gently through the world.
The one time I would have liked to take a photograph today would have been taboo. Scene: a coffee break in Leerdam. Opposite was an ice cream parlour with a 6-foot high plastic ice-cream cone outside. A little girl of three or four, momentarily unattended by an adult, climbed onto a bench and then onto the armrest so that she could check out the cone. She reached up to it and, removing her dummy, licked one of the plastic ice cream scoops at the top. And then got down again before the adult returned. I loved it – a small child forming a hypothesis and testing it! (But I’m not always so indulgent. The last time I watched a small child exploring the world it involved using my bike as a climbing frame. I was not amused then.)
We crossed the Waal on the bridge at Zaltbommel, as last year. The noise, volume and speed of the traffic was just horrible. Sometimes when our parallel paths – me on a cycle route, traffic on a motorway – run alongside each other I am pleased at our co-existence. Today however it was just depressing. So much traffic, so much noise. We’re really not going to change our ways.
Another coffee stop in Zaltbommel, which was an attractive old town. Then the top of the embankment beside the Waal (looking high – willows were half-submerged) to Rossum and another night beside water.
Old Shoe Box 