Seductions of Amsterdam

Published 20 Nov 2016

                                                                         Amsterdam

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Story of a trip I made with my elder sun in 1998

The port of Hull is an interesting one to depart from because we found our boat berthed in an enormous  pool, full only at high tide, so that it had to move through a lock to reach the river. It was the last week in October and night had fallen. At departure time the great ferry vibrated into life and began churning away from its berth, thrashing a mass of white water from its stern. Then the great illuminated shape began a slow revolution in the dark water of the lock, where little wavelets glimmered in the dockside lights. Very slowly it swung, infinitely slowly. More slowly than the second hand on a clock. 

Then, when it was precisely aligned with the lock, the great ship inched into it, slowly, slowly, for the strip of water either side was barely a foot wide. When the gates of the lock at last were spread wide, the imprisoned vessel floated free and escaped into the River Humber, where it swung east and sailed down the great waterway to the North Sea.

Ferry Leaving Hull Harbour

As luck would have it, I had not succeeded in booking a cabin for the outbound journey, and with the prospect of having to try to sleep in seats, we made for the bar and drained several cans of Guinness in the hope of nullifying any discomfort occasioned by our accommodation. Mind you, we would have done that anyway! Entering the sleeping quarters later, we found ourselves in a dimly-lit room where a selection of human forms were discerned, curled up or slumped among rows of seats. We stepped gingerly over a sleeping girl in bra and panties who was sprawled on the floor part-covered by a sleeping bag. 

Then, retracing our steps, we tip-toed up the central aisle, seeking accommodation just a little bit away from all these lolling bodies and found a row of seats empty of all but a blanket. The two of us slumped into seats there and tried to sleep, but sometime later, finding that I was unable to drift off to dreamland in a sitting position, I took a tip from others and slid to the deck and sprawled shamelessly on the carpet like a vagrant.

At that I went out like a light and slept for some three hours before I turned over and whacked my arm on something. I opened my eyes to see a pair of legs sticking out from under a blanket. What was this fellow doing sleeping here, with his feet almost on my head? Was it his seat? Were they numbered or something? Had he just left for the gents before we came in, returning to his blanket after we had lost consciousness? And how had he got past the full length of my body without disturbing me? He must have climbed over the seats.

Approaching Rotterdam

We docked at Rotterdam at eight in the morning, and then drove the fifty or so miles to Amsterdam. Holland is a densely populated country where all available space has to be used efficiently, which is the reason why, near the airport, we drove under a runway while a big aircraft taxied over it. We found a nice campsite in a picturesque area in a southern quarter of the city only three minutes' walk from the Metro station of Gaasparplatz. Here you could walk about on paths amongst the autumn trees or sit by a lake were ducks paddling about, and twenty minutes later be in the centre of Amsterdam.

Park Near Gaasparplatz

The Dutch have had to think more than most Europeans about their environment because they are many and their country is small. Whereas we in Britain have only just begun to think of ways of keeping traffic and people apart, the Dutch have been thinking up solutions for decades. There you can find roads, railways, paths and bicycle ways within close proximity of each other, but they rarely meet, and they are often screened from each other by trees. On the train from Gaasparplatz one day I saw from my window a column of motor vehicles moving on a level below, and below that, trees, a path, a man walking his dog. One day we walked out from the park where we were camped to find some shops. We strolled on paths amongst trees and blocks of flats. We never did find any shops, but ended up instead in a green field where cows grazed and ducks floated on a winding canal.

Amsterdam has joined my list of cities that I love. There are now two on the list. The other one is York. Like York, Amsterdam is a beautiful city. Its tall narrow houses give it a stately air, and its wonderful canals render it quiet, intimate, dreamy even. That's not to say there is no life there! Something about that in a minute, but at bottom it's a relaxed, unhurried sort of place, where car bumpers don't harass your backside, and where the only warning you'll hear to get out of the way is the ching of a bicycle bell

Amsterdam Canal Boat

One sunny afternoon we took a guided tour of the town on a canal boat, and then spent three more days visiting art galleries: the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh museum and the Museum of Modern Art. The first two were packed with interesting pictures to see, and we bought a few prints each to hang on the walls at home, but the Museum of Modern Art was a disappointment, unless you consider, for instance, an endlessly repeated black and white film clip of a girl in a dress doing a handstand against a wall - and thus revealing her knickers - as a fine example of art. Doubtless there's a bit of titillation there, but you soon get bored with it. Is it art, though? Or what about that other sample of so-called modern art we saw, consisting of a figure executed in blue fluorescent tubing on hands and knees, ducking its head up and down at a stonking great cock standing between the bent legs of a second figure lying on its back, while a third figure, kneeling behind the first, gives it what for with another great neon stonker? Was that art?

Not on your nelly. Still, I reflected, there are not really many people who can distinguish between art and trash. The great herd are content to goggle at anything, so long as it's new and titillating. Granted, we can find titillation and gratification in the pit of human physicality. Any fool can do that. But if we want to have just some tiny glimmer of the purpose and the meaning of human life, we must seek them in its spirituality. As Oscar Wilde once said: 'We are all standing in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.' The true function of art has been forgotten in our time. It is to make us aware of our spirituality, meaning that part of ourselves that is not just animated clay. It is to draw our eyes upward from the gutter of human frailty to focus them on the firmament of human possibility.

Everyone knows that hashish and marijuana are sold legally in the 'coffee shops' of Amsterdam. You just go in, my guidebook tells me, and ask for a 'menu', for they can't actually advertise the stuff. Apparently you can get it made into tea or cakes or just handed over for smoking. I wasn't interested and neither was my son, so we didn't bother. We were more interested in what they call the 'brown cafes', smoke-stained places with something of the atmosphere of English pubs, where you can pass the time with a Heineken, an Amstel or an Oranjiboom. And the great thing about these places - as with restaurants and shops - is that you can just go in and say what you want in English. Everyone speaks it. We found a couple of Irish pubs too in the town: Mulligan's, where Irish music is played sometimes, and O'Donnell's. The former is recommended in my guidebook for service and atmosphere, but we liked the Guinness better in the latter. (Too bad beer drinkers don't write guide books.) We even found a wonderful little tapas bar run by a fellow from Barcelona.

Dutch food, alas, is quite stodgy, like traditional English - plenty of meat and potatoes - but international cuisine is well-established in Amsterdam. During our five-day stay we had a Dutch meal, an Italian one, a Greek one, an Indian one and an Indonesian one. The Indian one was all right, but they do it better in Britain, and the Greek one was okay too, but the Italian one was excellent, served in a small place where people sat shoulder to shoulder on benches before two long paper-covered tables, or squashed onto a landing upstairs. Bags of atmosphere. But the most memorable meal was the Indonesian one. I asked our waiter for a recommendation, and he brought 25 servings of food - yes, 25 - ranging from mild to hot, and kept warm in little bowls over candles.

It's to our credit, I think, that we did not think of visiting Amsterdam's famous red light district until our last evening in the town. But now we chose a route through the quarter, a warren of streets between two canals, on our way back to the Centraal Station for the last time. My ignorance about such things is that I never really knew what these places had to do with red lights. If anything my puritan imagination had perhaps conceived the term as some sort of relic of the past. After all, I'd visited Soho in 1964 and don't remember seeing any red lights. I don't even remember seeing any girls back then, whatever the place may be like now. But in Amsterdam a red strip of light shone from over the door of each of the establishments to advertise the nature of the goods on offer. Not that any advertisement was needed, for next to each door a big brightly-lit picture window showed off the goods themselves, inviting examples, displayed in fluffy surroundings, of female flesh dressed in - or rather undressed to - something small and provocative. Had we happened on another museum? One housing exotic species in glass cases?

Much to our appreciation, we were able to enjoy the luxury of a cabin on the ferry back to Hull, where we arrived in the crimson mist of early morning. After a week in crowded Holland, Yorkshire seemed almost like the wide open West.

Return to Hull, Early Morning

In the Rijksmuseum I picked up a few prints of paintings, which have decorated my walls at home ever since. My favourite one is Winter Landscape with Skaters by the Dutch painter Henrick Avercamp.

Winter Landscape with Skaters

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