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21st - 23rd June Still at Leeuwarden
If I have given the impression that it does not rain in Holland then I was wrong; it does and it is and in addition a promise of high winds for the weekend keeps us from moving on to Lauwersoog where we will be sluiced back out into the North Sea. In spite of that there was a great open market in town this morning with such a choice of goods on offer from any garment imaginable in orange, to the revelation of all the things mankind can do to a dead fish before eating it. Avoiding the first, we were attracted to the later and joined a crowd sheltering under the fish wife's awning where we stood to dine on deep fried mussels and gambas while the man next to me did a cormorant imitation, tilting head upwards with open mouth and appeared to swallow a whole raw fish ( less head and tail. )
One of those "stop dead" moments occurred when the years flash back, on passing a cut flower seller, the unique fragrance in the air immediately took me back 60 years to the little flower shop around the corner from my childhood home in Bristol - extraordinary how memory and the mind works isn't it. I have included another worthy place winner in my photo album for a piece of artistic graffiti - a clever use of design, colour and lack of it and imagination - a lucky and interesting gift from the artist. See it in the attached photos.
Our Dutch chums Crus and Corry caught us up yesterday and parked next to the French OVNI so we had a communal re-union all in English which suited everyone except for Valerie's gnarled black cat who decided to go hunting in the park - ils s'appelle "pirate" pronounced pee-rat but does not have a wooden leg nor a patch over one eye.
Today is Mid Summer Day according to the calendar. The town has arranged three days of celebrations which I hope will please the Summer Deities as much as the Rain Gods have clearly been and I can still hear the Nederland Symphony Orchestra combined with a pop group working through all the old favourites. It had stopped raining as we stood in the City Proms audience listening to the show - we looked at each other, and without a word knew that we were both thinking " we are dwarfs surrounded by giants." These people are outrageously tall, why is that, is it the cheese?
Top class musical performances with all the mandatory flashing lights set against the Oldehove floodlit so that its mundane red brick slowly changed chameleon like through a range of exotic colours. You need to know that the Oldehove is an abandoned attempt to build a church in 1529 which after trying to correct serious subsidence during construction was never finished and remains today resembling a towering redbrick banana which leans more than the Tower of Pisa - it really does. The Rough Guide has it in a nutshell "A lugubrious mass of disproportion that defies all laws of gravity and geometry." - how true.
Music continued on the next day in an ornate proscenium stage close to the mooring where saxaphone and flute Master Classes were held followed by a Conservatoire Brass Ensemble working their way through Leonard Bernstein. Walking back, I disturbed a female greater spotted woodpecker searching for her lunch on a young lime tree, she checked me out, decided I was no threat, and carried on feeding just 10 mtrs from the boat.
I sketched during an outstanding performance of a post war violin concerto, very Shostakovitch or Prokofiev but probably neither. The Oldehove still leaning ridiculously - please note, and not my drawing.
The sun came out a little today Sunday, maybe we will move on tomorrow.
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