If it seems like this ex-pat blog is grinding to a halt then you’d be right. Our sedate Dutch lifestyle doesn’t throw up a great deal of interesting anecdotes to write about it. Middle-age couple potter around Haarlem market on a Saturday morning before cycling to the beach is hardly going to make riveting reading.
Our lust for exploring the Dutch countryside has dissipated, our sense of adventure has become swallowed up or submerged beneath those flat green fields. Even the tulips have now disappeared – a bright, brief respite from the blandness.
We need to get back out there, I said to Mr T. I need to find inspiration and motivation. Mr T doesn't lack motivation - last week he completed a Viking Challenge with a team of his young work colleagues. I have every admiration for his enthusiasm, a 13 km run interspaced with 30 obstacles which involved lots of crawling through mud and climbing over walls. Not for the faint hearted or anyone over the age of 50. Needless to say he won't be doing it again. My own personal challenge, having gone along to watch the start and elicit promises from his colleagues that they would bring him back alive, was cycling the 10 km or so back home through the Dutch countryside into a very strong prevailing wind.
This weekend in stark contrast, we set off in search of Dutch culture. We drove cross-country, to Paleis Het Loo on the outskirts of the town of Apeldoorn approximiately 100 km east from Haarlem. In the east the landscape does change. We found trees, and although there was nothing that could be called a hill, the land gently undulates. At one point we were 90 m above sea-level – that’s nearly enough to bring on a bout of altitude sickness by Dutch standards.
Het Loo was originally a hunting lodge owned by Stadtholder Willem II. For those who like a little history lesson this is the William of William and Mary fame, and when this Royal couple succeeded to the British throne in 1689 they decided they needed something a little grander than a hunting lodge so they expanded the lodge and created a palace. As extensions go, its pretty impressive.
The Dutch Royal family retained Het Loo as their main residence up until the death of Queen Wihelmina in 1962. Since then it has been fully restored and is now a national museum. The main attraction for me, were the gardens, and not so much the formal garden, which is laid out in typical Dutch style with cleverly crafted box hedging and a large fountain, but the informal ‘parkland’ which is based on an English style country estate . None of it is natural of course, the lakes and streams all being man-made, but with the rhododrendrons in full-bloom it made a very welcome change from the typical Dutch landscape.
And talking of something different, after we’d finished at Het Loo, we headed for the Kroller-Muller Museum which is set in the middle of the Hoge Veluwe National Park, a privately owned area of natural wood and heathland – similar in appearance to parts of the New Forest. As this all looked quite samey to us, and by now it had started to rain, we gave up on the idea of abandoning the car at the gates and using one of the free bikes to explore the park, and drove straight to the museum. The Kroller-Muller is home to the second largest collection of Van Gogh’s in the world, as well as displaying work by Monet, Picasso and Mondriaan, and the usual selection of ‘modern art’.
It’s hard not to admire modern artists, not for their creativity but their ingenuity. We can all make a display out of a pile of rocks, its convincing somebody to pay thousands of euro’s for it which is the clever bit. If I stuck a couple of dinky toys on a shelf next to a milk bottle with a handful of ballbearings in the bottom of it, would anyone call it art? No? So how do they get away with it?
In the sculpture garden people had got away with even more. Mr T is wasting his time buying pipes for the oil industry. He should be ‘sculpting’ with them instead.
One of the highlights of the show is probably the Jardin d'email by the artist Jean Dubuffet. I can't think of any words to adequately describe it and even the photographs don't do it justice. Philistine that I am I can see no connection between a large white epoxy-resin mass and an e-mail, (junk perhaps?) but what do I know. At least it was fun and you could clamber all over it.
The Kroller-Muller's most redeeming future is its beautiful setting. Who needs art when you have nature? It was quite noticeable how many visitors were posing for photographs beside the rhododendrons rather than the exhibits.
(Incidentally this is not Mr T and I posing by the rhododrendons but an exhibit entitled 'Femme et Homme'. If ever a piece needed a bit more work with the chisel - this is it.)
