The weather in Groningen being slightly better on my second full day there, we take the opportunity to climb the tower of the Martinikerk, a tower which was first built in the 1200s but has been rebuilt a number of times since then. Nevertheless, it is a formidable structure, notwithstanding the mechanised revolving door that lets us through to the entrance. The steps are many and it is icily windy as we climb; but mercifully there is no rain and so we can step out at a few points and survey the magnificent view the tower affords of Groningen. Eventually we find ourselves at the top, looking out over the city through the hands of the church clock. I notice the hands move, moments before the bells start sounding for the half hour, a surprising din that lasts a minute or so and leaves us both shocked and exhilarated when it is over. And then we take the stairs again, a little dizzy from the ascent and the tightness of the spiral beneath us. The air is fresh when we set out again and there is light drizzle, but this passes, and we are able to enjoy the more historic side of Groningen without the worst extremes of the autumn weather.

In the afternoon we set off towards the main canal running through Groningen. There is found the Groninger Museum, an intriguing, rectangular building covered in a mosaic of tiles, sitting within the canal with much of the museum’s exhibits half-below, half-above the waterline. It is a striking building and its exhibits are equally striking, including a permanent exhibition of 20th century Dutch Impressionist works – Dijkstra and others of his vintage – and a fascinating collection of Chinese ceramics dating to the high period of Dutch exploration and trade throughout Asia. Then there are the two special exhibitions: a collection of sculptures by a modern Chinese artist, Yin ???, who uses old clothes and other found objects to make large, intriguing representations of life, culture and emotion; and a collection of 19th and 20th century Canadian landscape painters. Both collections, in their very different ways, reflect their changing societies – China under urbanisation and Canada at a time of change in its northern rural areas. The collection is surprising and beautiful, and at times it is nice just to stand at one of the windows and look out onto the canal, the surface of which stands at chest level. It is a peaceful outlook, and a work of art in itself.

****

The next day takes us to two quite different places, though united surprisingly by one thing: the period of the German occupation of the Netherlands during the 1940s.

First we go to Haarlem, the place I know best as the home of Corrie Ten Boom, the spinster and watchmaker’s daughter who made her home a “hiding place” for both Jews and young men who refused to join the German forces during the war. Her house, still above a jeweller’s store, has now become a free Museum. Tours are run, in English and Dutch, on alternate half hours. The group on my tour is unexpectedly large and as a result we struggle all to fit in the space, but even this makes the experience an interesting one: it gives us a sense of how remarkable the Ten Boom’s generosity was in opening up a house that was quite humble and not especially large. We do not try to fit in the “hiding place” itself – a cavity behind a fake wall – where famously six adults hid for three days when the Ten Booms were arrested; but we can see for ourselves how extraordinary it was that they all stayed there as long as they did. One small boy is allowed to enter through the secret passage to give us a sense of how it was done; it is easy for him, but we can imagine who much harder it would be for an adult to do it, let alone six. The tour is moving and deeply memorable; I have read the story before, but it is another thing to look myself at the very place where the fugitives hid, to see Corrie’s Bible opened to the Psalm from which her most famous book took its name. I have had several experiences this week of standing in a place that has seen so much history; this gas been one of the most powerful of those moments.

In the afternoon, we take another train to den Haag, the seat of the Netherlands’ parliament and home to a number of other international and diplomatic bodies. It is also the home to the MC Escher Museum, a permanent exhibition of the Dutch lithographer and graphic artist’s work, situated in the old palace, a building simultaneously gloomy and beautiful and full of the kinds of mirrors and staircases that inhabit Escher’s work. Escher was undoubtedly a genius; a cursory glance at his most famous work can tell you that, but a closer look at the tiny, intricate details of his work, the near-perfection of its construction, reveals it in even deeper ways. Yet what is interesting to note, in contrast to the Ten Boom house, is the silent period in Escher’s work – a deacde-and-a-half missing from his body of work, the time of the German Occupation during which Escher had to focus on providing for his family, but finding quiet inspiration and clarification through reading Lewis Carroll and listening to Bach, creative kindred spirits for him. Escher, we are told, nearly went crazy from the boredom and tedium of his life at this time; Corrie Ten Boom nearly died in Ravensbruck.

It is an unfortunate comparison to make. Escher was a truly extraordinary artist and undoubtedly one of the Netherlands’ most significant cultural contributors of the modern age. It might be unfair to say he was complicit in the evils of Nazism, but there is no evidence in his work that he did anying to engage with the crisis that beset his nation and the people in it. Corrie Ten Boom is less famous; her books are not accomplished; her life was humble. Escher is remembered as a great artist and many know his work even if they do not know his name or that he was Dutch; Corrie Ten Boom is quite unknown to most people who are not Christian. It is a reminder that human greatness is often not bestowed for the right reasons, a reminder that loving and forgiving are more important than genius, however history may remember us.

The Netherlands now is an extraordinarily peaceful country. It is difficult to believe the pain it endured only 70 years ago. I will leave with these memories of it: its beauty, its culture, its efficiency and its peace. But times can come to all of us, unexpectedly, when all of these things are taken away. When that happens, what next? How will we respond when we find ourselves, like Escher, like the Ten Booms, like the artists in the Groninger Museum, losing the world we know well? I hope that this question too can stay with me; I can never tell when I will need to answer it.

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.

If, like me, you grew up with British culture from afar, through English novels, TV shows, films and a famous London-themed real estate board game, then coming to London for the first time will be full of odd little moments of recognition. You will find yourself walking down Oxford Street, only to notice Regent Street and Bond Street in quick succession. Then you will look up at a clock and realise that you are looking at Big Ben; or you realise that the bells you are hearing come from St. Martin’s, and though they are not singing, “You owe me three farthings”, they might as well be.

My trip into the city this morning was filled with moments like these. I set off with the intention of seeing Westminster Abbey and the House of Parliament, but while there I became aware of so many other places in the near vicinity of where I was: Trafalgar Square and the Nelson Column; No. 10 Downing Street (not accessible from the street, it turns out, at least not to the general public); not to mention all the familiar names of places and streets that jumped out at me as I walked. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a foreign city that is filled with so many ready-made memories and associations.

Yet those things which feel so familiar can catch us by surprise with just how different they are. Take, for instance, the convention here of standing to the right on an escalator; back home, it would be to the left. Everything looks and feels the same, but for one minor detail.

Then there are those moments which curiously blend the very familiar with the entirely different. The communion service at Westminster Abbey was a perfect example of this: a liturgy I know well, set in a medieval building so full of history which I have absorbed all my life yet never seen or connected with personally. Was I really standing in the building where William the Conqueror was crowned? Was that a real Medieval painting on the back wall of the chapel? Like the street names on a Monopoly board, I had taken in such things from birth, yet no more expected to come near them than I had expected to see a giant boot paying rent on a hotel at Trafalgar Square. And yet – the building where I took communion had born witness to people and times that for me was only the stuff of history books; and when I shared the greeting of the peace, I shook hands with people who, it seemed, came here for communion most days on the way to work.

Living in a relatively new city like Melbourne, it is easy to feel detached from the kind of deep history that London carries on its surface. I did not go to all of the Roman ruins that are here to be seen; there were locations from the books of my childhood that I did not have time to visit. I have spent much of my time here – only two days – trying to balance constant movement with just being: enjoying what is here; taking it in, not consuming more than I can process. But one memory will, I think, remain clearly: that moment during communion when I looked beneath me and stared at the tiles lining the chapel’s floor and realised that those tiles were profoundly, magnificently old, and I could wonder, for that moment, how many others, kings and commoners alike, had stood on that floor. I felt, for that moment, not like a tourist trying to squeeze in every significant London moment; I was a Christian, standing on the same floor as a millennium of other Christians. And that was a beautiful moment.

I did not get to see Buckingham Palace; I forgot to visit the Coliseum I saw listed on a map. There were Monopoly Streets I did not get to walk. I have had so little time and so many demands on it. In a London-themed Bingo contest, I doubt I would come close to winning. But I took communion at Westminster Abbey, and that was worth not having a sleep-in.

I have always wanted to come to England.

When I was a child, for reasons that have escaped me in the years since, I was quite an Anglophile and dearly wished that I had been born in England or, if possible, Scotland. It wasn’t possible; neither option was. I had been born in Australia, and that’s all there was to it.

Sometime towards the end of high school – owing to a mixture of having been to Europe on a cultural exchange (to Switzerland; it went badly) and studying Australian history, I started to appreciate my home country for what it was. The Europhile in me started to be tempered by the realisation that people who had approached Australia in the past with a wish to make it more European had not, generally speaking, been motivated to great love and good deeds as a result. It seemed better to love Australia on its own terms. And so I began to do so.

Still, there has always been a sense in me that somehow in coming to the UK I would be getting in touch with my origins in a way that couldn’t happen anywhere else. Much as I love Australia and much as I have grown to love other places closer to Australia – Malaysia, for one – I have retained an unresolved wish to go to the UK. And this year the announcement of two good friends that they would be moving to England gave me the push I needed. I had friends in Holland too; perhaps I could make a trip to visit them both. And so here I am, after a few months of planning and anticipating; here I am, with the sound of London rain outside my hotel room, my clothes drying from an outing in that rain and my stomach rumbling to tell me that, soon, on my way to Soho and the British Museum, I should get some lunch. But instead I am sitting on my bed inside a small but cosy – and delightfully warm – hotel room opposite Hyde Park, tapping out my thoughts so far on the iPad resting on my lap.

And what are those thoughts? First of all, it is all so amazingly familiar. It is a mix of two things that makes it so; first of all, the Kensington/Bayswater area where I am staying looks quite a lot like places back home – the area of Sydney, for instance, with a park also called Hyde Park; the older streets of Sydney’s Paddington. Despite the fact that it bears the same name as my home suburb of Kensington (and I am amused by the realisation that I am quite close to South Kensington Station, the name of the station where I catch the train to work most days), there is no real likeness to my home. But the name makes it feel comfortingly familiar. Then there’s the fact that I cut my literary teeth on the works of Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse and so there are many familiar sights – the sorts of streets that Poirot or Bertie Wooster would have walked; apartments like the ones they would have visited. And I am happily reminded of a scene in the first season of Fry and Laurie’s “Jeeves and Wooster” in which Barmy Fotheringay-Fipps says, “I don’t think I’ve ever been to Kensington”, to which Bertie replies, “Yes you have, Barmy. Your mother lives there.” And then a somewhat befuddled Barmy responds, “Oh, that Kensington.”

I, having moving from Kensington to Kensington, can understand a smidgeon of his confusion, and it pleases me to do so.

There is much left to see and little time to see it: I have not been down to the Thames; I have not seen Buckingham Palace or the Tower of London or Westminster Abbey. Will I have time for it all? Will the weather permit as much as I want to do? I normally enjoy just wandering through a city and soaking up its atmosphere; today I soaked up two parts water to each part atmosphere. But my stomach has not stopped pestering me and so I will need to face the rainy streets again even if only to eat. But I suspect I will be unable to stop myself from doing more than that. I am in London, after all, and after close to 28 years of wanting to be here, I think I will want to make the most of it.