Monthly Archives: November 2024

The Small Back Room (1949)

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Directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger with David Farrar and Kathleen Byron

A kind of film noir with Expressionist overtones. The “small back room” was the laboratory and offices of free-range explosive experts during WWII. There was a lot to like about the film, but I was put off by what I saw as melodramatic stereotypes. Farrar played a scientist straight out of a long line of rude, over-bearing heroes stretching from Mr Rochester all the way to Barbara Cartland and Mills & Boon. His prosthetic foot was reason enough for his ill-humour and desire to drown his pain in whisky, but it was done with all the subtlety of a marker pen. Byron was no better, her character written as a long-suffering woman descended from one of the droopier Dickens’s females. Their scenes could have done with a lighter or less clichéd touch.

Some scenes, on the other hand, were great: the bomb defusion was gripping, lots of incidentals intrigued or amused, and the drinking nightmare was brilliantly weird. Home scenes were constantly foregrounded by Byron’s enlarged photo on one side and the bottle of whisky on the other.

Gouda

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After breakfast I walked around Gouda while it was quiet and dry. It’s stereotypically Dutch – cobbles, canals, gables that look good reflected in those same canals. The town hall, the cheese weighing house, the grote kerk, the fish market arcade beside the canal (like Delft) that I remembered from a previous visit – I walked round them all.

I caught the train to Rotterdam (a headwind and memories of the dull ride decided me) and started cycling from there, and now I’m in Maassluis again.

Amersfoort to Gouda

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Another day of two halves: a morning ride through sandy woodlands that encouraged me to linger, followed by an afternoon of hard pedalling into a drizzly headwind as I misnavigated and realised that I still had miles to go. The wind is getting stronger and colder too; I turned right towards Oudewater and suddenly moved from a gruelling 7mph to an exhilarating – oooh! – 10mph or so as the wind caught my back.

At Zeist there was a big castle that I skirted round. Lots of forts south of Utrecht, and Nieuwegein and Ijsselstein had pretty old centres when I finally got through all their outskirts. I only really have time to stop for coffee and cake, but I did make exceptions for an undulating hedge dusted with fallen leaves and the biggest gathering of coots I’ve ever seen in one place. I had them down as unsociable birds: how wrong I was.

And so to Gouda. The light was fading as I arrived so I had no time to explore. In the evening I wandered out in search of something to eat; turning a corner, I suddenly found myself in the main square.

Zutphen to Amersfoort

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The tasting menu thing stretched to breakfast, which was definitely taking things too far! I had a full day’s cycling ahead and I wanted food, not dainty morsels displayed on stones and marble chips. Particularly not when the tastes include curry soup and goat’s cheese. Not flavours you want haunting you as you pedal along.

Unsurprisingly, I stopped at the first bakery I saw.

Zutphen is on the River Ijssel, which was very close to my hotel. Another pleasant – if damp and grey – ride through the sandy woodland and heath of the Veluwe.

It’s inevitable that I cross or repeat former rides as I cycle between Germany and Dutch ports. Today it was Building A of the transmitting station at Radio Kootwijk (1920) that got the second visit. This time I got the reflection in the reflecting pool. As I pedalled off I wondered if there was anything similar in Britain – Alexandra Palace, some of those place names on old radio dials like Droitwich? But actually I really don’t know the difference between a transmitting station, a radio mast and radio studios.

Once again, I realised I’d left myself with a lot to do in the afternoon. I arrived at my hotel at 4.30 p.m. with my lights on. It’s on the edge of Amersfoort, run by the International School for Philosophy. Each room is named after a philosopher: mine is Jean-Paul Sartre. As I walked along the corridor, past Wittgenstein, John Stuart Mill, Plato, Aristotle and Descartes, I found myself humming Bruces’ Philosophers Song from Monty Python.

Rheine to Zutphen

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In addition to train disruptions, the weather forecast is getting wetter, so I’ve decided to bunny-hop across the Netherlands. Bicycle-train-bicycle. Hopefully I’ll end up where I need to be and stay reasonably dry.

Today I left Rheine and followed a direct route to the Dutch border. Another grey, damp day, so more photos of orange leaves and winding routes (some of them obscured by said orange leaves). I swerved the centre of Bad Bentheim, got confused in Oldenzaal thanks to my navigation and another omleiding, and caught the train from Hengelo-Oost to Zutphen.

The Netherlands are much further along the everything-on-the-app route than Britain. I feel like the kid in class with the wrong trainers. Hengelo-Oost is a tiny station (easier to navigate with a bicycle) with a ticket machine that refused to accept either of my cards. I bought my ticket online instead but couldn’t see how to include a bicycle ticket. Unfortunately the emailed ticket is not the ticket – oh, no. You have to download it to the NS app . . . which I then acquired. But the ticket and the app refused to communicate – so, eventually, there I was, on a train with an invalid ticket for me and no bicycle ticket in a country where exiting bigger stations (e.g. Zutphen) is like Alcatraz unless you have the magic bar code.

I needn’t have worried after all: no ticket collectors, no barriers at the station, and a ticket machine that graciously allowed me to buy a bicycle ticket after the event. And I had time to wander around Zutphen before it went dark. Typical Dutch centre and a church that made me realise how building in brick allows you to build enormous multiple windows with more delicate supports than in stone. It makes the massive structures seem transparent.

Dinner in tonight’s hotel was a tasting menu. No choice (except that I specified no meat) so a succession of morsels was placed before me and described minutely. Dinner as performance, and I played along with it – noticing the flavours and eating more delicately than is my (bad) habit. An interesting experience but I’m not bothered about repeating it.

Osnabrück to Rheine

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Reasons why I like cycling in Germany #273: I leave a bland city-centre hotel where the lingua franca is International English and set off to find my parallel cycling universe. And there it is, only a couple of blocks away. Infrastructure, signs, considerate drivers and – above all – the confidence that this will not all disappear in the next couple of miles.

Comfort cycling in Osnabrück

I started off on the scenic route – a compensation to myself for shelving my original plans. Even though I’ve cycled in this region before, it was still pleasant and felt novel – uppy-downy with some wooded paths. I even ended up on the 100 Schlösser Route, which was ironic since it was in order to escape that route that I’d come to Germany! The day was grey and damp – so damp that the moisture coalesced and fell as light rain in the early afternoon. Thank goodness for leaves: the beech trees glowed orange even in the dull light. At my lunch stop (which seemed to materialise at the right moment since it was only 25 minutes before it closed) I realised that I wasn’t even half way to Rheine. Fortunately the second half was more direct, clinging to the Ibbenbürener Aa, crossing the Mittellandkanal and following the Dortmund-Ems canal towards Rheine. (With an Umleitung, of course. There are always Umleitungen or Omleidingen beside canals.)

I kept to the main road coming into Rheine; there was a cycle lane and the weather didn’t encourage me to dawdle. One has a very different perspective cycling on the more usual thoroughfares rather than threading a way in via railway sidings, allotments and streams. You can see how main-road stores with car parks are eating away at town centres. Heigh ho: times change.

It was nice not to eat in the hotel but to walk through the town to find a restaurant that took my fancy and watch cyclists’ red lights glide across the square while sipping my Grauburgunder.

Osnabrück

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The usual 30km ride from the ferry to Rotterdam Centraal – into a headwind, which is just unfair. I’m more familiar with that ride now that routes around my own neck of the woods. Then trains to Amersfoort and then Osnabrück. I just ask people to help me get my bicycle and panniers onto the high trains.

The list of things that can go wrong has grown. Last-minute platform changes I am used to (there was one at Leeds yesterday that set me running), but today I was introduced to the sense of ignorant helplessness you feel when everybody else knows what is going on because they are on the app and act as one – leaving me stranded. We were all waiting on platform 14 when, like a shoal of fish, everyone turned and started flowing down the escalator. No announcement – just a hive-mind connected by the app. Someone said “twaalf” to me, so I dashed to platform 12. There was a train – still no announcement – and I stood by the door with the bicycle symbol. Another mass flow – the train was only the front half.

Anyway I got to Amersfoort – and discovered that I was in time to catch the much-delayed Berlin train that calls at Osnabrück. I had a flexible ticket so that was OK, but I didn’t have a bicycle reservation for that particular train. Since my bicycle was the only one in the racks, I don’t think I inconvenienced anyone.

Upshot: on a day of train traumas, I got to Osnabrück an hour earlier than expected.

But the real depth charge to hit my holiday is today’s announcement that there are strikes on some Dutch trains from tomorrow. I’d already factored in Sunday’s closure of Osnabrück station to remove a bomb (if I’ve translated correctly) and its impact on my vague plans, but the thought of Dutch trains being unreliable when I was relying on them to carry me across the country on Monday is too much. So farewell Bremen and the Geestradweg. I shall be just be pedalling west into a headwind for the next few days.

And making the best of it.

Well, it’s not like I didn’t know the risk:

Tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chambre