I first began to consider coming across to Europe late last year when good friends of mine moved to Holland. “Of course I’ll come and visit you over there,” I said, and made noises about September 2012 being the time to do it. It quickly began to seem to me a ridiculous thing to do – so much money; such a long way to go; besides, I do too much international travel; maybe some other time…And yet, to cut a long story short, here I am, somehow at exactly the time of year I first said I would come. First two days in London, then a glide across the Channel in a cramped Air France craft then a train ride up north, and by mid-afternoon yesterday I stepped out at Groningen Station to the sight of my friend Phil waiting for my arrival.
The first thing that struck me about Holland (and I can use that name, Groningen actually falling in the northern region of the Netherlands to which the name accurately applies), once my train had made its way out of the greater Amsterdam region and into the countryside, was that it was all a striking, deep green – the grass, the hills, the trees, all astonishingly green. Then there were the canals – somehow just as you would expect them to be, yet startling for that very reason. When I first saw a field of black and white cows beside a canal, I was instantly transported to a picture book from my childhood, a Dutch story, I recall, about a cow falling into a canal. (It was, I think, appropriately and simply titled something like The Cow That Fell Into the Canal. There seems to me now to be something so very Dutch about such a straightforward and direct title. What else would you call a book about a cow falling into a canal?) What arrested me as I peered occasionally from my book and out the window of the train was how this place could look simultaneously just how I expected it to and also nothing like it. I expected it to be flat, and it was. I expected it to be bland, and it was not. Somehow flatness here does not equate to blandness; how unlike those long, sweeping plains from home.
It is approaching winter here, and I am told that Holland gains Britain’s weather about three days later; having arrived in England three days ago, I knew what that meant – grey sky and constant rain. Sure enough, today the rain came; not heavy rain, but persistent. Phil and I were undeterred, hitting the streets of Groningen in the late morning, visiting the University where his wife Erin works, scouring an impressive record store called Plato, where I buy a cheap copy of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme”, passing the obligatory red-light district (a girl in alarmingly skimpy lingerie steps out into the street and walked over to a pausing car; why am I alarmed? Surely not by the thought that such things exist but that they can be seen so simply, so unobtrusively, in the middle of a cobble-stoned street on a rainy autumn day?). And then, after lunch – a trendily healthy meal at a place called Puur – one of those Dutch words that look so different yet sound so remarkably just like English – we took refuge from the rain inside the Martinikerk – St Martin’s Church, a medieval structure once Catholic then, when the Reformation hit Europe, Protestant; a fascinating witness to many periods of history, its ceilings bearing frescoes from the 13th, 15th and 16th centuries, sections of the building carrying signs of expansion and redevelopment. The man who sold us our tickets strikes up a conversation with us about the fake brickwork in parts of the church and the quirks of Northern European church architecture – why the choir has thirteen pillars, an unusual number found only in two other churches in Europe, one in northern Germany, the other in northern Italy; the strange fact that while the church building is owned by the church itself, the tower is owned by the government, a vestige apparently from the Napoleonic era. Then, once we have taken in as many frescoes as we can, we head out again into the rain in search of coffee and shelter.
When we set off for home in the early evening, Groningen’s streets shine from the steady downpour and the town is full of cyclists weaving in every direction, expertly managing the wet cobblestones and the cars and pedestrians competing for the space (Phil tells me that here the order of priority on the roads is bicycles, then pedestrians, then cars). The rain eases off as we walk home but sets in again for the last few minutes. The apartment is comfortable and warm when we get back; we put on the Coltrane CD and talk religion and politics while the rooftops and streets outside sparkle in the rain.
The Consolations of Writing 