Goodness, Time Flies

A whole month of inactiv­ity here !

Dur­ing which I’ve done what seems like a lot of work, but also had a hol­i­day in Delft, a poetry record­ing in York, a good cir­cu­lar tour to the south and west of the city by bike, and have read Kristin Lav­rans­dat­ter, and some fas­cin­at­ing his­tory and archaeology.

Delft is a delight — we arrived on a Sat­urday in July, to find a bust­ling con­ven­tional mar­ket, a hop­ping flea-market and just the end of a stomp­ing jazz/cajun free con­cert from a barge on a canal. And food ! One does not think of the Neth­er­lands as gast­ro­nom­ic­ally dis­tin­guished (com­pared to its Flem­ish neigh­bour, Bel­gium, say) but by choos­ing res­taur­ants which advert­ised dutch / flem­ish spe­ci­al­it­ies we ate really really well. Of course, if it is so hot that you just have to spend the middle of the day sit­ting in a plane-tree shaded square drink­ing iced cof­fee, beer, and iced tea, and tak­ing 3 hours over lunch, then the world looks incred­ibly rosy. But it’s such a civ­il­ised town — and of course you can hire bikes really cheaply at the sta­tion (the shop is open from about 7.00 to 23.00) and pot­ter around the town or head out into the coun­try where there are cycle tracks every­where and bikes are acknow­ledged as equal road users with cars.

We went intend­ing to buy some new pan­niers for our Dutch bikes back home — and were so spoilt for choice we bought 5.

Then, sit­ting out at the front of the hotel late in the even­ing, a peace­ful canal, whis­key or cointr­eau in hand. I could get used to leisure.

If you care to go to www.radioryedale.co.uk you will find under “poetry corner”, 1^st or 4^th August, some pleas­ant read­ings, includ­ing my own “Bare­foot in the Dark” and “Doncaster”.

I think “Kristin Lav­rans­dat­ter” by Sigrid Undset is as good as “Anna Karenina.”

Did you know that dur­ing the Black Death, although the Lon­don dead were bur­ied in mass graves, they were not just tipped in from the carts, as we ima­gine from accounts of the Plague in 1665,but care­fully laid out par­al­lel, but up to 5 deep !

That’s enough for now !