Accidents Will Happen

 Firstly, apologies to any regular readers for lack of recent posts. To be a successful blogger you need a succession of events to blog about.  The daily grind in California always seemed to provoke some sort of WTF jaw-dropping moment, while our life in Haarlem seems to tick over relatively smoothly. Moving from the UK to the Netherlands has been a comparatively easy transition. The Dutch, apart from all that cycling, are remarkably like us - the Brothers Gruff and Grim on wheels - and so too is the weather.

Following a two week stay in the UK catching up with friends and family, we have returned to Haarlem with the student daughter in tow while she waits for uni to begin back in Bristol.

The first item on her agenda was a trip into Amsterdam. Amsterdam reminds me of London. It’s more a separate entity than typical of the country it’s in. It’s a law unto itself, and therefore a day out in Amsterdam, is very different from our ‘normal’ routine here in sleepy old Haarlem.

Deciding to set off early to see if we could beat the queues for the Anne Frank museum, our plans were immediately delayed at the station when the O-V travel card top-up machine declined my payment, and then totally scuppered by three coachloads of Japanese tourists with the same idea. By the time we reached the Anne Frank House the queue was already snaking around the block.We re-grouped and decided to go to the Royal Palace in Dam Square instead.  Anne Frank may have been an early riser, but the Royals like a lie-in. The palace didn’t open for another hour.  Early morning, first week in the New Year was not a good time for killing an hour wandering around Amsterdam’s narrow cobbled one-way streets.  The regular hazard of kamikaze cyclists was compounded by hoards of early morning delivery vans, street cleaning vehicles and Xmas decoration removal trucks. Roads were completely blocked and the whole place was one big accident waiting to happen.

We took refuge in a café.  The stackload of crockery that came crashing to the ground as the waiter overloaded the ‘empties’ trolley with one tray too many right in front of us was just a taster of what was to come.  Back out in the street a middle-aged lady with no spatial awareness (yes – that was me) narrowly avoided  having her arm taken off after misjudging the distance (and time) needed to skip around the parked delivery truck before the oncoming tram.  Next, a teenager waiting at traffic lights (yes - that was her) just avoided being mown down by a reversing window-cleaner’s van by her quick thinking mother who grabbed her out of the way in the nick of time. In between we also witnessed another white van man reverse straight into a motorcyclist. Now I know why there are so many people parading as the Grim Reaper in Dam Square.

After lunch most of the deliveries appeared to be over and I did contemplate perhaps returning to the Anne Frank house to see if the queue had gone down, but by then we were nearly back at the Central Station. To stay one moment longer in the city where we had already cheated death seemed like tempting fate….

Back in Haarlem, just yards from our house the student remarked quite merrily that we had made it home unscathed, before tripping up on a loose paving stone.