Month: May 2024

Beers to Xanten

A varied day’s cycling to take us across the border: main road to the Maas and then, after the ferry crossing, a green route beside the river and through woods on an old railway line (the Boxteler line) into Germany. Then a main road again for coffee in Goch – which seemed much less middle-class than towns in the Netherlands somehow. Main road again (good for covering the miles) and the Boxteler Bahn and green roads to Xanten.

This time I had just enough time to walk to the market square and admire the cathedral behind and the Gotisches Haus – which apparently re-used tufa blocks from what was left of the nearby Roman town founded by Trajan. That rather pleased me.

Rossum to Beers

At breakfast I watched storks fly over the hotel towards the Waal. Later we saw several of them in a flooded field – presumably eating their breakfast. Rain was forecast, so we made it a short day via route one. Rain started to fall after the ferry to Lith and then continued to get heavier. Like the proverbial frog in heating water, we didn’t realise how wet we were getting until we were fairly soaked.

At Ravenstein I remembered the cafe we had found last year, so we refreshed ourselves there. The rain had almost stopped by the time we arrived at Beers early afternoon but there have been a couple of downpours since then.

Schoonhoven to Rossum

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.

Europoort to Schoonhoven

A moment of sheer euphoria as we reached the wide, continuous cycle path right outside the ferry terminal. A promise of two weeks of stress-free cycling ahead of us . . . well, at least as far as the infrastructure goes.

A slightly different route this time to avoid the Ridderkerk-Krimpen aan de Lek ferry, but otherwise the same as previous years. Good to know I can still do it (although the strong tailwind part of the way helped enormously with cycling and mindset).

Hull and Hedon

A quick visit to the Ferens art gallery this morning. An upstairs gallery had been dedicated as “the calm gallery” – art as an aid to mindfulness. Unfortunately they’d stuck an inflatable artwork in the middle of it; like a garish bouncy castle, it required air to be constantly pumped into it so the noise level meant there was no chance of hearing yourself think. As for the rest – the little time I had made me focus on just a few paintings that caught my eye. “Sunlight and Shadow” was so simple – geese for goodness sake! – and effective.

And then more Hullish cycling – this time along the dock road, the A1033, mercifully furnished with a scrappy two-way cycle path. Where was all the traffic going to? Unlike Redcar, there was certainly still industry around – Siemens making wind turbine blades and Saltend Chemical “Park” – but beyond that I had no idea. We finally left that world behind by turning off to the village of Paull beside the estuary. It seemed like another world! Then inland to Hedon again (once a port) and finally to the ferry.

Beverley

Hull today. I noticed from the train how threadbare trackside trees looked now that ash die-back is so established. After a second breakfast we cycled to Beverley and back. I’ve now cycled as much of Hull as I ever want to. On the map it has lots of cycle infrastructure, but in reality it’s bitty, contorted and comes from the age when cyclists were grateful for anything. It was more enjoyable to abandon the signed Sustrans routes and just use minor roads with their fringes of cow parsley and comfrey.

And Hull, outside its centre, is . . . well, not very inspiring. I did discover past traces of prosperity and elegance in West Hull when we came across the (restored) fountain on The Boulevard – tree-lined with traces of Victorian respectability in the old Sunday School, villas and chapels. The smell of joints undermined the vibe somewhat.

New German cinema

I think I tried Fassbinder in my twenties when I wanted to be “cultured” but, without a primer and too used to Hollywood and the BBC, I really didn’t get him. Too earnest. It didn’t even improve my German. It makes me appreciate all the more the benefits of being led to the trough!

So:

  • Pre-war and wartime flight of film talent from Germany, leaving not much behind.
  • Literature and theatre were the first art forms to be revived after the war.
  • Reticence in post-war Germany about using film for anything more than entertainment – too tarnished by working with the Nazis.
  • Oberhausen Manifesto 1962 calling for new German film: Papas Kino ist tot.
  • Television was obliged to support film-making after 1974.
  • Auteur theory.
  • Seen against the background of the Red Army Faction, the “German autumn” (1977) and the 1972 Munich Olympics. I’d rather forgotten what an angry decade that was.
  • This was only about West Germany.

Fear Eat (sic) The Soul, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974

Fassbinder didn’t go to film school; he learned via theatre and collaboration and his output was prolific and varied. Here he echoed the melodramas of Douglas Sirk (also German, I have learned): a love affair between an ageing Putzfrau and a young Moroccan. The clip we watched had me hooked: the whole mise en scène from the use of colour, distance and symbols (grilles and stairs). Fassbinder sympathised with the marginalised, and this comes across very clearly. Perhaps I might watch it one day.

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, 1975

Based on a 1974 novel by Heinrich Böll. After the tableaux of the previous film, this was very confusing: multiple points of view and uncertainty for the viewer about what was happening. In that way it reflected the disruption and danger of the 1970s. It seems to be about how an innocent woman is punished for spending one night with an alleged terrorist, mistreated by the police and vilified by the media. I can’t say I want to see the whole film, but it did remind me that previous generations have been just as outraged by the abuse of authority as anyone today.

Aguirre, The Wrath Of God, Werner Herzog, 1972

Herzog really is sui generis. I’ve seen the film before, but this time it was great to linger on the painterliness of some scenes. And then there was the action – less great. I suppose the knowledge that the film crew really were shooting the rapids on flimsy rafts might add to some viewers’ enjoyment, but not mine. I really don’t expect actors to put themselves in physical danger for my entertainment. And, after that po-faced comment – of course I want to watch it again.