Communicating with Pictures

Pictures can be used in many different ways to promote communication. Here, we are mainly concerned with pictures that are made for non-commercial purposes. We focus on images made for education and social change, in both developing and industrialised countries.

Pictures can be used for:-

decorating the environment, to make it more aesthetically pleasing
providing information
announcing events
coding and decoding reality
stimulating dialogue and discussion
analysing situations and issues
planning action
art therapy
self-expression



Pictures can be used in many different contexts and situations. These include:-

health education work
environmental education
the classroom and playground
community art and community development projects
political campaigning and advocacy
detraumatisation and therapy sessions
art wortkshops

There are many different types of pictures that can be used for educational and social purposes. Basically, these can be divided into two categories:-

interactive or participatory pictures
non-interactive or stand-alone pictures.


When preparing and using pictures, we need to think about the kind of communication that we are hoping to achieve. It may be useful to ask ourselves which of the various models of communication is most suitable for our purposes.


One-way Communication

In the one-way communication model, information is sent by a transmitter, or sender, to a receiver. An example is the transmission of information from a radio set to the listener.
With images, the picture itself is the transmitter of information, while the receiver is the person who sees the image. An example of this is a poster or pictorial advertisment displayed on a wall.


People who design pictures for one-way communication aim to 'send a message' to other people who make up the 'target audience' for the message. For example, members of the target audience may be intended to receive the message of an advertisment and, as a result, buy the product shown in the image.
This kind of communication is used by people who want to send out propaganda, or announce an event, or sell a product. It is not intended to promote dialogue between the sender and the receiver. It does not stimulate critical thinking on the part of the person who sees the image. It involves monologue rather than dialogue.
Junk e-mail sent to a computer often takes the form of one-way communication. If you try to reply to it, your message cannot be sent to the person who contacted you with their unsolicited and unwanted message.
Charities or large NGOs send out graphical e-mails asking for financial donations. Often it is not possible to reply to these messages. NGO websites are often designed to try to raise funds. On such sites, it is clear how to send money. If you want to contact the NGO for other purposes (i.e. for your purposes), the 'contact' button is often small and hard to find.


Essentially, one-way communication is authoritarian. It is reminiscent of the way orders are issued in an army. The receiver is not meant to question the communication but simply to obey what it tells them to do. One-way communication is characteristically used by organisations which have a strict hierarchical structure. It is also often used in the classrooms or lecture rooms of schools and universities. Mass media also generally rely on one-way comminication.


Two-way Communication

Two-way communication takes place, for example, when two people have a conversation.

In an educational context, it also sometimes occurs between teacher and student. Students may be allowed to ask the teacher questions or to make comments on what the teacher has said. In two-way communication, students speak only to the teacher, not to each other.


In the classroom, the teacher usually stands at the front of the class while the students sit in straight lines. The teacher is the centre of attention, the most important person and the owner of the greatest power in the classroom situation.
Pictures can be used in two-way communication. The teacher may show the students a pictorial teaching aid, for example. Or a community health worker may show a group of people a visual aid and explain to them what the picture means and also, perhaps, what they should learn from the picture.


Two-way communication involves a limited form of dialogue in a group situation. It goes beyond the monologue that characterises one-way, authoritarian communication.
A fuller and more active dialogue between people in a learning group is promoted by a different approach that involves multi-way communication.


Multi-way Communication

Multi-way communication takes place when a group of people discuss an issue with each other. It is a participatory and people-centred way of communicating.


Pictures can be helpful in stimulating multi-way communication. A community health worker can, for example, use a visual aid to encourage discussion among a group of women. Pictures can be used in many different contexts to promote people-centred communication.
Images of this kind are used in group work, where dialogue can take place between everyone in the group. In this situation everybody's knowledge and experience can contribute to the discussion. Multi-way communication is an inclusive process. It is more likely to lead to critical awareness than authoritarian, one-way communication.


.People-centred communication usually involves a different physical configuration of the learning group. The rigid, masculine configuration of one-way communication, with its straight lines of students, is replaced by a circular, feminine configuration. The teacher no longer stands while the students sit. Instead, the facilitator sits at the same level as the learners.
In people-centred work, we do not talk of 'target audiences' or 'messages'. Rather, we speak of 'sharing knowledge and experience'. Facilitators do not follow a pre-determined curriculum. All the learners help to decide on the agenda for the learning session. The facilitator does not try to maximise her own power. On the contrary, she tries to facilitate a more even distribution of power within the group.

Pictures for Critical Awareness

Critical awareness results from ways of thinking that are analytical and evidence-based. It enables us to see the relationship between causes and effects in our lives and environments.


Critical awareness results from rational thought processes. It is distinct from magic thinking in that it helps us to understand our reality in useful ways. Rational thought processes exclude ideas drawn from superstition and religion. It is consistent with humanist principles.
Some types of pictures can help learners to develop critical awareness. Such pictures can be used in a group-learning situation. Learners together analyse what is shown in the picture. Pictures like this are interactive and participatory. They involve multi-way communication.
Pictures for critical awareness include Discussion Starters and various kinds of Picture Cards.
In general, pictures for critical awareness have some or all of the following characteristics:-
They deal with locally important themes
They show situations that are familiar to the people who use them
The theme of the picture is chosen by members of the local community where the picture will be used


They contain several interacting pictorial elements in one picture; or they can consist of several separate but related pictures
They encourage learners to make causal connections between the different elements or pictures
They do not usually show 'solutions', only 'problems', so that learners arrive at their own solutions through discussion and analysis
They are 'open-ended' to allow learners to analyse them in different ways
They do not usually contain words
They are not so simple that they suggest a pre-determined 'correct' response
They are not so complex that they are difficult for learners to understand
They are made locally, often by women


Discussion Starters

A discussion starter is a picture that is used in a group-learning situation to stimulate discussion and to promote the exchange of ideas about an issue or a set of issues. Discussion starters are good for helping people to analyse the causes of problems. They show learners that a problem often has several different causes that are related to each other. They help learners to clarify the relationships between the different factors that cause the problem.

Discussion starters can be very effective in helping people to develop some of the logical, analytical thinking skills necessary for the growth of critical awareness. Also, the process of using a discussion starter in a community can provide a very useful example of a practical, problem-solving approach which can be applied to many local issues.

Like other pictures for critical awareness, discussion starters do not show solutions to local issues. Rather, they show images which illustrate problems in local communities. Learners, or community members, discuss and analyse the problems shown in the picture and come to suggest solutions to some of the issues that arise during discussion.

The term ‘discussion starter’ can be confusing, because field workers sometimes speak as if a discussion starter is any picture that is used to promote discussion. Here, however, we are using the term in a stricter sense - a discussion starter shows the characteristics typical of pictures for critical awareness and it is used in a particular way, as described below.

A discussion starter is very similar to a ‘picture code’, a type of picture used originally by Paulo Freire to help people develop literacy skills. Such pictures ‘encode’ some aspects of local reality. During use, learners ‘de-code’ the images shown on the picture in order to better understand local reality.


How to make Discussion Starters

A discussion starter is usually made on a single sheet of paper. The picture is drawn or painted or photographs can also be used.

Once the theme for your discussion starter has been chosen, you will need to start thinking about what elements need to be included in your design. It may help to write down a list of these elements. Ask yourselves ‘What are the various factors that are causing the problem we are addressing?’ and make a note of your answers. You can later use your notes to tell you what you need to represent in your picture.


How to use discussion starters

When you come to use your discussion starter in a group setting, you will need to carefully guide the discussion through six distinct stages. In this way you will get the most out of your picture, rather than simply allowing an unstructured discussion to take place. The six stages are as follows:-

1. Describe the picture
2. Relate the picture to real life
3. Identify problems
4. Look for causes
5. Look for solutions
6. Plan action

Let’s look at these stages in more detail.

1. Describe the picture

To begin with, ask the people in your learning group to describe what they see in the picture. You can ask questions like “What do you see in the picture?” or “What is happening in this picture?”.

At this stage, you can help learners who have difficulty in recognising or understanding what is shown in the picture. Make sure that everyone in the group knows what the picture is meant to show. This is an important step which can help learners to improve their visual literacy skills.

2. Relate the picture to real life

In the next stage, the facilitator can help the learners to relate what is shown in the picture to their own lives. The picture should show, of course, situations and activities that are familiar to the learners. Referring to the picture, you can ask questions like “Does this happen in our village?” or “Do the people in the picture remind you of people in our community?” In their answers to questions like these, learners begin to relate the theme of the discussion starter to themselves. They begin to see how the image may be relevant to their own community. Thus, learners talk first about the picture and then about how the picture’s theme relates to their own experiences.

3. Identify problems

Next, the group should try to identify what problems are shown in the picture. The facilitator should continue to encourage learners to relate things to their own lives. To explore some of the consequences of the problems shown in the picture, the group can discuss questions such as “What effect is this likely to have in our community?” or “Do our children suffer as a result of the sort of situation shown in the picture?”, and so on. At the end of this stage in the discussion, the group should be clear about the main problem(s) and should have had time to think about and discuss the various implications of the situation shown in the picture.

4. Look for causes

Up to this point in the discussion, the group has prepared the ground so that learners are ready to examine the situation in an analytical way. At this stage, you look for causes of the problems you have discussed earlier. This is an exciting stage and one which is most important in the development of critical awareness.

The group considers questions like “What causes these problems in our community?” and “Why does this happen?”. Learners are encouraged to think quite deeply about the various causes of the issues under discussion. It is this attempt to analyse the local situation that will help people to develop a more critical awareness. The facilitator should allow plenty of time for the group to make this analysis. It is not enough for learners to accept the first and most obvious cause of the problem(s) and to look no further. Almost certainly there are deeper causes. The facilitator should help learners to look for these deeper, underlying causes.

Anne Hope and Sally Timmel, authors of the book ‘Training for Transformation’, write that “Problems are like weeds. If we only cut off their heads they will soon be back, but if we dig deep and get out the roots, they will not grow again.”

Generally, it is best not to make this deeper analysis in a way that sees the issues only in the context of one sector (e.g health, agriculture, water and sanitation, etc.). Your discussion starter has been designed in a way that is open-ended enough to allow group members to make their own, possibly varied, interpretations. Simply because you, as facilitator, may be, say, a community health worker does not mean that the issues can be perceived only in terms of health. It is very likely that factors relating to water and sanitation, agriculture, labour relations, etc., will also play a part.

The process of analysing the theme of your visual aid can generate much varied discussion. The knowledge and experience of all the learners can contribute to the explanations of causes. This may be quite a long process. The facilitator should try to allow enough time for everyone in the group to be actively and thoughtfully involved. More than one group meeting may be needed to permit a sufficiently detailed analysis.

At the end of this important stage, the group can make a list of the different causes that they have suggested and discussed. By this time, group members will have seen more clearly that any problem can have a number of different causes.

5. Look for solutions

The next stage of the discussion is about looking for solutions which correspond to the causes identified by the group. Each cause can be discussed in turn. The group can then decide what they think is the most appropriate or best solution(s) corresponding to that particular cause. Learners may find it useful to make a list of their solutions next to their list of causes.

Sometimes, the solutions will be such that the group feels the need for information or technical knowledge which they themselves do not posess. This will, perhaps, need to come from outside their own community. It may mean that they want to contact some other people who are more knowledgeable about the technical or other aspects of their solutions. It may also mean that they feel that they could benefit from having additional information-giving visual aids such as posters, leaflets and manuals.

Often, too, the discussion may lead to the feeling that the issue(s) and the possible solution(s) need to be talked about more widely, with other people in the community.

6. Plan action

Next, your discussion will need to focus on some practical questions. The group needs to plan action so that the solutions identified by group members can actually be brought about in practise. Group members can try to think about ways in which they themselves, together with their friends and neighbours, can solve the problems. In other words, they can try to plan self-reliant action

To help do this, the facilitator encourages people to think again about the causes and solutions they have identified. If you have made a list of causes and solutions, you can refer to it again at this stage.

In order to make each solution actually happen, you have to specifically determine what action needs to be taken. When the group has decided on this, you can write another list - this time a list of actions to be taken. This could be called the group’s ‘Action Plan’.

Next, you will need to be clear about exactly who is going to do what and when and how they will do it. Some of the work can be done by group members themselves. Often, other people will need to be involved also. It is essential to get people to agree to actually carry out the actions they have planned! Yet another list - of names next to relevant actions - may help.

The action plans that result from using discussion starters are, of course, very varied and will depend on local circumstances. Your action plan could involve individual action (i.e. one person volunteers to carry out a particular task) and/or group action.

Quite often, the process of analysis leads the group to realise that some form of community meeting may be needed. This happens when the proposed action to solve a part of the problem cannot simply be taken by one or a few individuals. The wider community may need to be involved. Learners and others then begin to understand the importance of community organisation. People see that, although they are relatively powerless as individuals, by working together they may be able to bring about social change in their community.

The action plan can also involve further visual aids. The group may have decided that they need information from outside their community. This might take the form of information-giving pictures. Group members may also feel the need to discuss, in greater depth, some other issues or related themes. This, in turn, could mean that they will want to make further discussion starters or other types of visual aids. For example, if community meetings are to be held, the need may arise for the production of posters that announce where and when the meeting is to take place.

Finally, you may want to make other types of pictures about the same theme and about related issues. For example, learners may be interested to make their own discussion starters and picture cards for use with other groups or individuals in their community.


An example from Brasil

This picture is a discussion starter made by Maria de Lourdes de Conceicao, a community health worker from the Caranguejo favela (slum) in Recife, north - east Brasil. It deals with issues about health and environmental sanitation.


Lourdes and her colleagues recognise that many of the health problems in their community stem from the fact that the favela contains a network of open drainage canals or ditches. These ditches act as reservoirs for diseases such as cholera. Another concern of the community health agents at Caranguejo is the large quantity of rubbish (garbage) scattered around in their community.

The picture shows several aspects of life in the favela. There are local houses; drainage canals; a child playing in a drainage canal; some piles of rubbish; a person defecating in open space; animals; a group of people sitting together.

Some of the causes of environmental health issues are :-

1. Children play in dirty drainage canals;
2. People defecate in open places;
3. Drainage canals are used for waste disposal;
4. Piles of rubbish are lying around the favela;
5. Rats and other animals spread disease;
6. There is no proper sewage system.

Some solutions are:-

1. Discourage children from playing in drainage canals;
2. Build latrines;
3. Cover small drainage canals;
4a. Clean up rubbish;
4b. Improve rubbish disposal by provision of adequate waste containers;
5. Keep environment cleaner;
6. Get a proper sewage system built.


Some of the corresponding actions that people in the favela could take are:-

1. Help parents and children learn about the health risks of playing in the drainage canals;
2. Approach outside organisations to supply materials and technical information about how to construct latrines;
3. Organise a community meeting to plan how to enclose drainage canals;
4a. Organise teams of volunteers to clean up rubbish in the favela;
4b. Lobby the municipal corporation to provide more waste containers and to collect rubbish more frequently;
5. Organise community meeting to discuss how to keep the favela cleaner; undertake communication activities to help community members learn about health risks associated with a dirty environment;
6. Approach outside organisations re. funding and construction of a sewage system; lobby local government.


These are some of the ideas that came up when Lourdes used her discussion starter with her community at Caranguejo. The suggested solutions and action to be taken are not easy. This may mean that not all the suggested ideas and action can be put into practise. People may not have enough time or energy to do this work. However, changes were made at Caranguejo as a result of Lourdes using her discussion starter. Some drainage canals were covered, some educational activities were undertaken, some outside organisations were contacted.

This sort of process will not necessarily produce immediate results but it is going in the right direction. Using the discussion starter at least helped to clarify what the community can do to change the situation.There are rarely quick solutions but, for people as poor and oppressed as the inhabitants of Caranguejo, beginning to see that their own actions can bring about some changes is a real step forward. Your discussion starter will not solve all the problems straightaway but it will help to start the process of reflection and action necessary to bring about social change.


Picture Cards

Picture cards are, like discussion starters, interactive visual aids that help people to talk about and analyse local issues and to plan action. Picture cards are sets of separate but related pictures which can be used in several different ways. Picture cards are usually made on paper, often backed with stiff material such as cardboard for durability. They can also be made on cloth. Normally the pictures are approximately A4 in size.

During use, picture cards can tell a story or learners can arrange the pictures into categories or sequences. Picture cards are very flexible and open-ended. They lend themselves to being used and handled by the learners. Consequently, they are particularly good at promoting active involvement by the learners.

You can make picture cards by drawing or painting onto paper or cloth. If the technology is available to you, you can also use photographs and computer-generated images.

Picture Cards for Telling stories

One possibility is to make a set of picture cards which tell a story. A group of learners could sit together and think of an important issue in their local community. Pictures can be made to show different scenes in the story.

In order to make full use of the flexible and open-ended nature of picture cards, it can be good to make the pictures in such a way that there is not a single, fixed storyline. Often the same set of pictures can be used by different people to tell different stories.

There are also different ways of using the picture cards. For example, the facilitator can show each picture to the learning group, in turn, to illustrate the story as it proceeds. After the story has been presented in this way, the learners discuss what it means to them. The facilitator can guide the discussion to help learners identify and analyse the issues raised by the story. They can then look for solutions to these problems and plan action accordingly (see the section on Discussion Starters).

A second way of using your picture cards is to give the set of cards to one or two members of the group and ask them to arrange the images in a sequence that tells a story. These learners then present the story to the group. The presentation is then followed by a discussion which should always aim to help learners to analyse their reality, develop critical awareness and plan action.


An example

This example again comes out of work in favela communities in Recife, north-eastern Brasil. This set of cards contains only 4 picures - usually it is better to have more images (12-20 images is common) but it serves to illustrate how people can make images to illustrate their own lives and the issues which concern them.

The four pictures are intended to tell a story on the theme of drugs, unemployment and crime. They were made by Monica Hollanda of the Coelhos favela in Recife.



The first picture shows a woman shouting at her unemployed husband, who has failed to find work and has been taking drugs.


The second picture shows the woman lying on the floor of her house, with tears falling down her cheeks. Plates for food are laid on the table but they remain empty.


In the third picture, the husband is thinking about using a gun to solve their problems. Is he going to commit a robbery? Is he thinking of shooting himself or his family members?


In the fourth image, the man is shown coming out of a prison cell into a courtroom. Above the judge is the Brasilian flag, with its motto “Order and Progress”.

Although this is an unusually small set of pictures, it is easy to make up one or more stories from these dramatic images. Also, you can make the story even more interesting if you give the characters names.

After telling the story, the group can discuss the issues raised in the story. They can share their experiences of issues like the effects of drug-taking, in their families and community, the difficulty of finding employment, the problems associated with widespread ownership of guns, the role of the police, and so on. They can try to find some solutions to the problems in their favela and help each other to think of any practical ways that life can be improved.

Oxford Town, Oxford Town

Now WASH your hands

At the beginning of the year I received an e-mail from my friend and Health Images colleague Petra Rohr-Rouendaal. Petra had been asked by Oxfam to do two hundred and twenty five black and white line drawings about water, sanitation and hygiene issues, for use in emergency situations around the world. She’d been working on this for a while, when it was decided that the drawings would be good in colour. In her e-mail, Petra, whose work is always in great demand, intimated that she could do without colouring all these images as well as drawing them in black and white. I replied, rather flippantly, that I would be happy to colour them if she didn’t want to, as I didn’t have much work on at the time.

So, between February and the end of June, that’s what I found myself doing. Seventy five images for Sub-Saharan Africa, the same number for Latin America and a similar set for Afghanistan and Pakistan. People shitting behind bushes, latrines, people washing their hands, preparing food, going to church, mosque or hospital, watching a puppet show, groups talking with each other, women collecting water from pumps and rivers, chains of contamination and so on... More or less every day for four months several hours on Photoshop for me, no exercise, a pain in the neck, an overworked mouse, but feeling that I was doing a worthwhile project, saving the world rather than designing leaflets for music festivals and drama productions. Stamina and deadlines and pleasure from working on Petra’s great drawings.

So, when I got an e-mail from a young Oxford graduate called Sarah-Jane Knock, asking if I would display some Health Images pictures at a conference entitled “Students and Development” at St. Anthony’s College, I gladly accepted the offer of a brief change of scenery. (The other changes of scenery I had had during this period were a short trip to Amsterdam and a couple of visits to the James Paget hospital in Gorleston for uncomfortable tests to see if I had bowel cancer).


In the Rose Garden

A couple of days before driving down to Oxford, Jacky and I attended a reception put on by our local environmental conservation charity The World Land Trust, for whom I’ve done graphics over the past twenty years or so. It was held at the home of Andrew and Alexandra van Preussen in Horham, near Eye in Suffolk. David Attenborough was there and it was nice to see him in the flesh, in his crumpled linen jacket. One of the van Preussen’s pride and joys, of which they seem to have several, is their rose garden. Since one of the WLT’s latest projects is in Paraguay, they had invited two musicians, Alberto Pino and Christoval Pederson, formerly members of Los Paraguayos, to play their instruments, a guitar and a harp, in the rose garden. Terribly civilised on a June evening in rural England, pink champagne and canapes.

Presentations were made in the Great Barn and included a film of David Attenborough in his twenties, on a politically incorrect ‘Zoo Quest’, wearing a dark suit and tie in the rainforest. After the film, Sir David said that he had done everything he could to stop it being shown, even offerring to bribe the WLT. He explained ruefully that even this had failed and commented that this had probably been the first time that the WLT had refused to accept money. Referring to his younger self, he asked, quizically, “Who was he?”.


And so to Oxford...

The drive across to Oxford was uneventful until I lost my way on the outskirts. I passed the huge Cowley car plant where they make some of the smallest cars in the world - Minis. Taking a wrong turn, I entered the village of Sandford upon Thames. I saw two people sitting at a bench outside the village pub, so pulled up to ask if they could direct me to Freelands Road in Oxford.

They turned out to be a friendly couple who were, in fact the pub’s landlord and landlady, relaxing as they had no customers. The man went into one of the neighbours’ houses to ask if they could help. The landlady shouted out to her daughter to come outside. An extremely fat thirteen year old girl came to the pub doorway.

“When you go on the school bus, is there a stop at Freelands Road?” “yes”, the girl replied glumly, “It’s just past the garage that’s closed down”. The mum was then convinced that she knew the place and gave me accurate directions. Then the landlord returned from the next door cottage with completely different directions.

Just recently I’ve been reading ‘Waterlog’ by Roger Deakin, in which he mentions the village of Sandford on Thames, in which I had mistakenly arrived. He talks about Jerome K. Jerome’s ‘Three Men in a Boat’ in connection with Sandford and quotes the author’s description of the Sandford lasher, whatever that is. “The pool under Sandford lasher is a very good place to drown yourself in”.

I met Sarah-Jane Knock at her house and was introducede to her house-mate Jo, a rather serious girl who had just finished her finals in Pure Maths and Logic. I was well impressed and thought how wonderful it must be to study pure mathematics for three years in Oxford when you were young.

A pair of crossed oars were displayed on the kitchen wall. These had been gained by Sarah-Jane’s fiancee, John. “I haven’t got my blades yet”, she explained. They were also into rock climbing and bouldering. I said I used to go out with a girl from Chesterfield and not far from where she lived we used to watch rock climbers. It was out beyond Chatswirth Road, the road in which my former friend lived. “Wow”, expostulated Sarah-Jane, “ I used to live just off Chatsworth Road, in Holymoorside”.
Another small and insignificant coincidence. She then told me that her non-identical twin sister was now working for the government’s Child Poverty Unit, having also done a degree at Oxford, a city partly populated by boys and girls who had done well at school, many having been head-boys and head-girls.

We drove to St. Anthony’s college with the stuff for the exhibition. With the help of her friend Emmanuel, an interesting French boy with a long face who was also studying International Development, we put up the Health Images display.


Another coincidence

In the evening I was on my own, as Sarah-Jane was going off to a ball at Balliol. Before leaving, she gave me directions to a couple of recommended pubs. I walked into town alongside the Thames which is, I think, called the Isis in Oxford. I made my way on the towpath past the boathouses of various colleges and saw the narrowest narrow boats I’d ever seen. Meeting the road by the ‘Head of the River’ pub, I crossed over the bridge and made my way into town, passing several American tourists en route.

When I reached Cornmarket, I was surprised to see, in the distance, a busker playing a harp. I walked slowly past, enjoying the sound, and bent down to put some coins into the busker’s hat. Straightening up, I looked briefly at the harpist and was astonished to find that I recognised him. Yes, it was Cristoval Pederson, the Paraguayan harpist I’d met two nights previously in the rose garden in Suffolk. We laughed and greeted each other. “What are you doing here?”, I asked. “I’m busking”, replied Cristoval. He was staying with a friend in Oxford and would be doing a gig the following night at the Holywell Music Room with a singer called Miriam Scruby.

I wandered past a long queue of students in dinner suits or shiny dresses, waiting to get into the ball at Balliol. Then, down an alleyway, I found ‘The Turf’, an ancient higgledy-piggledy tavern which sells moderately good ale. Next, I partook of another solitary pint of beer in ‘The Eagle and Child’. This was the pub where a literary group, who called themselves ‘The Inklings’ met to discuss literature and have a drink. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein were leading members with a religious bent.

Continuing my modest pub-crawl, I called into ‘The Head of the River’ pub, where the TV was showing a European Championship football match between Turkey and Croatia, historical adversaries. At the final whistle, I made my way back along the towpath, finally arrivig at Freelands Road where I read a few pages of Louis de Berniere’s brutal ‘War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts’ before nodding off.

In the morning, I decided to go back into town, so was soon plodding again along the towpath. The drizzle was moderate to heavy and there was plenty of Saturday morning activity in and around the boatsheds. I saw thirty dicks and ducklings all in a line, proceeding in an easterly direction on the river. Several coaches cycled along the towpath shouting at young rowers. “Bury that blade!”, “Wrist flat, arms straight”, “Charlotte, sit up, don’t hunch”, “Not like that”, “That’s better”, “Keep going”,

Up in town, a young man handed me a leaflet I hadn’t asked for. He had a placard that read “Have you met your father yet?”. The leaflet was quite a dark red with black type, like letterpress. On the back it said “A child needs its parent, human beings need the Creator”. I went into the HMV store.

Browsing through the CDs I noticed “Inna Gadda da Vida” by Iron Butterfly and UB40s “Rat in the Kitchen”, the cover of which I designed twenty years ago. It looked like our kitchen at Holly Tree Farm, which hasn’t changed much except that there are now no American jets in the windowframes. The peace dividend that never happened much. I weanted a new CD to play on the journey home but couldn’t find anything among the millions of albums. Funny, but it happens that way sometimes.


Natural History in Cabinet

Heading towards the university’s Natural History Museum, I spotted several empty Veuve Cliquot bottle, presumably discarde after the ball. Headaches this morning, strangers in strange beds. Inside the museum I first noticed a flock of busy bird enthusiasts from the Oxfordshire Ornithological Society. They were nerdlike and may have lived with their mothers.

Just along from the OOS display was a chest of museum drawers with six rows and four columns. On top was a sign that said ‘Natural Histort A-Z’. It was a game for children. On the front of each of the drawers was a letter of the alphabet. U and V shared a drawer, as did X, Y and Z. The bottom drawer contained the answers. Work it out for yourself. In each drawer were specimens from the collection whose names started with the letter on the front of the drawer. I opened a few. In M were shells, for Molluscs. In R was a rabbit, sectioned vertically to exhibit its internal structure. In D resided some very large and shiny Dung Beetles.

The roof of the museum was made of ironwork, rather like a Victorian railway station cum cathedral, complete with pointed arches and upper clerestory. God’s waiting room. The displays took me back to the days when I studied Biological Sciences at university. Familiar words like Phylum Hemichordata, represented in the exhibit by some acrn worms from the Class Enteropneusta. The some arrow worms from the Phylum Chaetognatha and, moving on, the wonderful Hercules Beetle from somewhere in south America, Dynastes hercules. Raising my eyes, I observed an ophicalcite column from County Galway,
before coming to rest in front of a delightful Secretary Bird, Sagittarius serpentarius of the Order Falciformes. “The name comes from its plumed head which resembles old-fashioned lawyers’ clerks with quill pens stuck behind their ears”. The the jaw bone of a tiger followed by the familiar shells of the snail Cepea nemoralis, which is very common in Oxfordshire - tigers are not. Oxford gentlemen academics from the Ecological Genetics Group studied C. nemoralis in the fifties and sixties, wearing tweed jackets and smoking pipes and occasionally engaging in same sex activities with undergraduates who wanted to get on in life. From these studies they concluded that natural selection was happening all around us every day.

Wandering on, I overheard a large American girl say to her friends “Oh, butterflies and moths - I can’t be dealing with insects”. Then a lungfish pickled in formaldehyde, looking very contented.


Pitts River

I proceeded into the amazing Pitt-Rivers museum, muttering to myself “For fuck’s sake don’t start writing a blog about this, you haven’t got the time, you’ll never finish”. Within minutes I was taking notes.

Just to say, briefly, that I loved the huge Haida totem pole from the Queen Charlotte (not the rower) Islands in Canada. It had cost $36 in 1901. And that I found the jumbled cabinets absolutely absorbing, mirrors of human possibilities.....

The first cabinet I examined was entitled ‘ Methods of Making Fire’. The next, ‘Coiled Baskets’, then ‘Trumpets’, followed by’Drums’, after which I looked into ‘Bells, Rattles and Xylophones’. Just fascinating. Next, ‘Spinning and Winding’, to the right ‘Lutes’, then ‘Writing and Communication’. I chatted to the attendant, an old boy with a pleasant Oxfordshire accent, about the subject of the next cabinet - ‘Lamellaphones’. He said that, many years ago, on a late night bus, he’d heard a West Indian bloke playing one. Finger pianos. Top deck.

“Oh shit, this is all getting far too interesting”, I thought to myself, imagining the M25. I couldn’t help looking into ‘Tallies and Counting’, ‘Message Bearing’, ‘Writing Equipment’, ‘Saddlery’, ‘Zithers’, ‘Votive Offerings’, ‘Sympathetic Magic’, ‘Charms Against the Evil Eye’. Apparently, Sumerian records from ancient Iraq going back 5000 years mention the Evil Eye.

Feeling rather enchanted, I made my way through ‘Amulets, Charms and Divination’, ‘Treatment of Dead Enemies’,
‘Betel-chewing Equipment’, ‘Opium Pipes and Equipment’, ‘Smoking Pipes and Water Pipes’. After a short break to look at the ceiling I ventured into ‘Skates and Snowshoes’, Stools and Headrests’, ‘Wooden Locks and Keys’, ‘Objects Used As Currency’, ‘Staves and Weapons Denoting Rank’, ‘Vessels’, ‘Rank, Status and Prestige in Nuristan’, ‘Ornaments of Boar Tusk’, ‘Combs’, ‘Mirrors’, ‘Hair’, ‘Head, Neck and Breast Ornaments’, ‘Ornaments of Teeth, Claws, Quills and Bone’, ‘Tails and Buttock Ornaments’, ‘Trade Beads’, ‘Feather Headdresses’ and ‘Death’.

The attendant handed me a form and asked if I would mind filling in a questionnaire about my visit. I awarded full marks to every category and ticked every box with enthusiasm before moving ever onwards to ‘Buckles and Fasteners’, ‘Umbrellas’ and ‘Games, Puzzles and Toys’. At one point there was a notice saying that this museum had inspired several writers, including Philip Pullman, Penelope Lively, James
Fenton and Colin Dexter.

Gazing into ‘Surgical Instruments - Algeria’, I thought “Colin Dexter’s not a writer”. Then a beautiful Hardanger Fiddle caught my attention, with its six sympathetic strings and four unsympathetic, not very compassionate ones. I asked the attendant if he could show me the smallest object in the collection and he took me to see a tiny doll, made in England and less than a centimetre high. That was enough.

On my happy way back out of the natural history museum I stopped to admire an Emperor Scorpion, Pandinus imperator; a Scarlet Tarantula, Lasiodora klugii; a Whip Scorpion from Peru, Phrynus sp.; and some lovely Sea Spiders from the Class Pycnogonida. There are more than a hundred thousand species of pycnogonids alive, including the one on display, Colossendeis wilsoni from Antarctica. Got to get out of this place....

I walked back along the river with a full head. It didn’t matter that I’d failed to purchase a CD. I hit the road at Donnington Bridge and went into Bridge Stores to get a bottle of water for the drive home. The shop was run by a Chinese lady, whose six or seven year old son said to me “You got a dinosaur on your pad”. He had a slight but most attractive strabismus in one eye and was referring to the notepad I’d bought in the museum. I asked him if he’d ever been there. “I bin to Pitts River” he replied joyously. That was my last small encounter in Oxford before my drive home, which featured ‘Sundirtwater’ by The Waifs, the ‘African Blues’ compilation and the ‘Reggae Love Collection’.

A Cure for Herrings

We sailed on the Stena Hollanica from Parkeston Quay at about 11 p.m. A couple of days in Amsterdam. I grew up about three miles from Parkeston, and my dad regularly piloted the ferries to the Hook and yet I’d never been to Holland in my life before. The nearest country to home.

Somewhere in another lifetime...

One of the best friends of my youth was a boy called Gerrard McCaffery. He left school at 15 and got a job on the boats. He passed his driving test on his seventeenth birthday and the next day bought a Jag. Second hand, walnut dashboard, leather seats for the girls. He’d graduated from his Lambretta but was still a Mod. Ben Sherman shirts Pirate Radio off the coast. One summer I had an Austrian girlfriend. I can’t remember her name but I strongly associate that period with Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum and ‘Hey Jude’. Take a sad song and make it better. Then I went off to university, discovered a bit of the world and came back to find that Gerrard had taken over the Austrian girl and was about to marry her.

Nearly thirty years later, the phone rang and it was Gerrard, calling from Austria. Quite unexpected and fairly boring. Our friendship had only ever been about being Mods and chewing Juicy Fruit while trying to pick up girls on holiday from the East End in his Jag. By the time he phoned I didn’t do any of those things. All I really remember about the call was him saying something like “I’m quite surprised you’re still alive. I thought you and Hughie Short might have died of drugs or drink by now”. He was a ski instructor.

It was exciting to be going on board. We were a bit early, so we had a drink in the Cliff Hotel in
Dovercourt, then made our way to Parkeston. The football pitch where I often played for Little Oakley against Marine Shops had been concreted over and was now a lorry park edged with wire fencing and searchlights on pylons. As we approached, the security bloke emerged from his kiosk. He looked like he’d watched too many American films. Sunglasses at this time of night? He tried to look as if he was taking us seriously as nautical terrorists - two white-haired people in a respectable family saloon. He directed us, militarily, to our parking place. We embarked some time later, a bit delayed as Jacky became absorbed
looking at a series of embroidered panels made by the womenfolk of Harwich and depicting the town’s history and landmarks in a charmingly naive style. There was, for me, a pleasant familiarity about the whole scene.

I had the top bunk with C.J.Samson and ‘Sovereign’. It was rough getting up there as I hadn’t noticed the ladder. We both slept comfortably and soundly. Before we knew it, we were wandering towards the train at the Hoek at 8 o’clock on a quiet Sunday morning. We had to change at Rotterdam.

Classic landscape from the train. Dykes, cows, distant sharp church spires, the occasional farmhouse, diggers digging ditches, stands of poplars. Opposite us was a living consequence of Dutch colonialism. A young girl with a doll’s face, Indonesian bone structure like Java man. Interesting profile, wearing a hood edged with imitation rabbit fur.

We got to Amsterdam at about ten o’clock. The city’s early success was partly down to a man called Willem Beukelszoon who, in 1385, invented a new way of curing herrings. This meant that the herrings lasted longer before going rotten and so could be exported. Together with the beer trade the herring business helped Amsterdam’s merchants to get the economy going. The rest is history...

Except for dodgy people

Coming out of the station millions of bikes, leant together in rows of Olympian proportions. On the
pavements. We found the Hotel France where it had always been, on the Ouderzijds Kolk, the edge of
Chinatown and the Red Light District. We chose the Hotel France because it was fairly cheap and left our bags there till
check-in time later.

We wandered down the nearest street. Indonesian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Malaysian establishments, an
English Pub with a sign in the window saying “Everybody Welcome Except For Dodgy People”, a bread shop with the word Brood in big letters across its window, a place for foot massage, a gay bar, an Asian Fusion eating house, some souvenir shops, rubbish bags, dog shit, the smell of skunk, long-legged girls on sit up and beg bikes, picaresque and seedy. I read later that this street, the Zeedijk, has seen its fair share of wine, women, drunken sailors and drugs for several centuries. A Bhuddist temple, Chinese Acupuncture, a Scandinavian Pub, Japanese, Portuguese and Greek restaurants, Tapas bars, a shop selling requisites for dope smokers, small tins with pictures of cannabis leaves on their lids.

Entering Nieuwmarkt we saw the last surviving gatehouse of old Amsterdam, a great hulk with turrets, the whole thing built of brick, in 1488. Amazing bricklaying. For some time it was used as a place for weighing market produce and was known as the Waag, which means weigh in Dutch. We sat at a cafe, as you do in European capitals, and had a coffee or, in my case, a glass of hot water. And a green tea bag, separately. Along from us sat a woman wearing high leather boots, a mini-skirt, a blouse unbuttoned to display an expansive cleavage and on top a three quarter length plastic leopard skin coat. She looked like she’d had a hard night.

Joods

We proceeded down St. Antoniesbreestraat, where the Jewish community used to live. They’d never been made to live in a ghetto in Amsterdam. Nearly all the old houses had been knocked down in the 1970s and replaced with uninspiring apartment blocks. We passed smelly coffee shops and Rembrandt’s house, making our way to the Joods Historisch Museum. A man wearing a natty white skullcap came out of a door into the Portuguese synagogue. We carried on into the museum and entered into a reconstructed synagogue. A large Torah scroll unrolled on a lectern, silver jads, long handles of silver with little hands at one end, not backscratchers, used by the cantor to keep his place while reading from the huge Torah. Also on display a set of circumcision instruments.



Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal during the Inquisition came to Amsterdam. Many were rich merchants with good global business contacts so they were welcomed by the Dutch. A couple of centuries later, the poor Ashkenazi relations arrived in Amsterdam as refugees from Lithuania, Poland and Germany.

The Portuguese connection seemed to be quite strong. The Portuguese synagogue was the largest synagogue in Europe when it was built. In the museum/replica synagogue there’s an imposing oil painting of a Portuguese dude by the name of Soussa. He’s sitting handsomely in a wealthy setting, a sheen of great wealth on his face. He’s holding an orange in his hand to symbolise his acceptance, as a Jew, into the Amsterdam establishment. He seems to be wearing lipstick, I thought. I was fascinated to learn that of the 400 or so plantations owned by the Dutch in the northern part of South America, more than a hundred were owned by Sephardi Jews.

Another interesting Jew who lived in Amsterdam was the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. He was Jewish but didn’t make himself very popular with the Jewish community as he didn’t believe in God. I studied some of Spinoza’s philosophy at university, along with that of all the other philosophers discussed in Bertrand Russell’s “History of Western Philosophy”, which I really enjoyed and read from cover to cover. Spinoza argued in favour of a rather attractive philosophy known as pantheism, according to which the ‘divine’ exists in everything in the natural world, a bit like some Eastern religions such as Buddhism. To most Jews in Amsterdam, though, he was just a trouble-maker and they sort of sent him to Coventry.

Another trouble-maker was a man called Sabbatai Zevi, pronounced Zvee. He was a serious bullshitter who pronounced himself to be the new messiah. Plenty of Dutch and other Jews were taken in and started to worship Zevi. Later, people lost faith in him, particularly when he converted to Isalm under the Ottomans!

Some other items caught my attention in the museum. A sort of flag made out of buttons to advertise the wares of a lady called Sally Polack who, like the great Argentinian bandoneon player El Polaco, must have come from Poland. Lots of little lead seals originally attached to meat as a sign that it was kosher. Photos of poor Jews in Amsterdam in the early twentieth century - hawkers, rag and bone men, matchbox and shoelace sellers all living in poverty in slum conditions.

Duende Dos

That evening we walked across to the western side of the city. It was all a bit more spacious than our hotel area. Big trees in spring leaf hanging over canals, of which there were plenty. We saw people sitting on their front door steps drinking wine, overlooking one of the canals. We passed houseboats large and small. On the deck of one was a huge pot with a lilac tree growing out of it. I had the pleasure of using a ‘pissoir’ for the first time since my visit to Paris at the age of fifteen. It was odd to be urinating while looking out through the metal grille at young people picknicking on a landing stage below on a warm, relaxed spring Sunday evening.

We were heading for a tapas bar called ‘Duende Dos’ on Nieuwe Willemsstraat in the Jordaan (Garden) area of the city. The place was pretty full when we arrived at around 7 o’clock, everybody tucking into their tapas, drinking wine, families, some Spanish, pictures of flamenco dancers on the walls with the word ‘Pasion’ written on them in large letters. A cheerful buzz. As it happens, I’ve been having a bit of a Spanish phase recently. A few weeks ago I went to a concert by the wonderful flamenco guitarist Juan Martin; I’ve been looking again at the BBC ‘Por Aqui’ book to revise my Spanish, I’m learning a tune called Latinish Gypsy on the guitar, been reading ‘Hacienda’ by Lisa St. Aubin de Teran, went to see a film version of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ “Love in the Time of Cholera”, playing again my Radio Tarifa CDs and, most recently enjoying some TV programmes presented by Andrew Graham-Dixon about Spanish art and culture.

Actually none of these were really reasons for us heading to Duende Dos. Instead, we went to hear the music of a gypsy jazz guitarist born in Vietnam of English parents. His name is Robin Nolan and he’s written the most useful tuition books on gypsy jazz guitar playing. His band was playing later so in the meantime we amused ourselves with a bottle of Rioja, several aceitunas, boquerones, alcochofas, patatas bravas and an ensalada espinacas. Our waitress was so helpful and everything tasted good. At the table behind us was a Spanish slightly extended family. One of the women had a stammer. I’d never heard anyone stammer in Spanish before.

The musicians turned up - two lead jazz guitars, double bass and rhythm guitar played by John Friedrichs. Jacky sat next to his wife and had a good chat. Wonderful music, just the right atmosphere. Sitting with us were two young musician friends of the band. They were students, one studying composition, one a gypsy jazz guitarist, so I bought them a couple of beers. One was from Turkey, the other from Greece, historical enemies but best mates.

During the interval I had a chat with John the rhythm player . He gave me a few tips. I said I practise with a metronome. He said “Do you know how to practise with a metronome?” I said I thought I did but maybe I didn’t. John said that what you have to do is set the metronome going and tap your foot, keep tapping until you get the rhythm in your whole body and only then start playing your chords. John said you have to do this for two hours a day for ten years. That’s what he’d done, anyway. I bought Robin Nolan a beer by way of thanking him for his tuition books. After the interval the band was joined by an alto sax player who was also a fine musician. More or less a perfect European evening.

Johnny Sahib

I woke on Monday morning feeling weird and claustrophobic in our hotel room with no window so went out for a stroll to clear my head. I just wandered around the block, relieved to find that it was a cooler day. Just walking, getting my head together, on a canal bridge when a woman passed on a bike and addressed me in Dutch. I walked on, half awake, and the woman called out “Hey, Johnny, don’t go away. You wanna buy my bike? I don’t really want to sell it but I need some money”.

She looked Indo-Chinese, I imagined her to be from Vietnam but maybe more likely Indonesian, Dutch East Indies. Another consequence of colonialism. I said I didn’t want to buy the bike. She looked me in the eyes and said “You wanna come with me?”, in a quiet Eastern female voice. She was quite pretty in a Dutch East Indies kind of way. “No, my wife’s in the hotel just round the corner, but thanks for asking”.

“Can you give me a few coins, just a little something? I can’t even afford the metro”. I didn’t say “Why do you need the metro when you’ve got a bike?” and gave her a few Euros. She thanked me and we went on our ways, me feeling weirder than ever at the thought conjured up in my mind by this encounter. Especially her calling me Johnny, like Surabaiya Johnny or Johnny Sahib. I reflected on the way that there was still a kind of colonialism in the relationship between the woman and her clients. The same poverty and vulnerability, the same abuse of power. I found it all very sad, as she was probably a heroin addict and had, no doubt, stolen the bike to get some money, a common practise among Amsterdam junkies I think. What a life...Johnny.

Alive, alive-O

I ambled back to the hotel and walked into a broom cupboard next to the door at the bottom of the stairs. A very strange pre-breakfast interlude altogether.

The arrangement at the Hotel France is for guests to take breakfast at the next door establishment, the Molly Malone Irish Pub. As we walked into the dark bar, Sting’s weedy voice came through as piped music. “Message in a Bottle”. Wooden casks lined the walls, labelled ‘Poteen’, ‘Klarenaer’, ‘Jameson’, ‘Paddy’, ‘Korewijn’, ‘Roggenaer’, ‘Taainagel’.

Breakfast was pretty lousy, crappy bread, jam in plastic containers, slabs of processed Gouda, all designed to get lots of people fed with something in as short a time as possible at the lowest possible cost. Good fun, though. Sting moved on to “So Lonely” or was it “Sue Lawley”? An old French couple sat silently beside us. Everything cramped, terrible seating arrangement, surrounded by all things Oirish - a copy of The Irish Times, empty bottles of Hennessy cognac and Coleraine whiskey.

Tucking into a slab of processed Gouda, I made Jack laugh by saying “Well, I’ve already walked into a broom cupboard and been propositioned by a Vietnames prostitute and it’s only breakfast time”.

Button Heaven

Our plan was to go to the Noordemarkt. On our way there we saw the customary array of long-legged young Dutch women bearing down on us from their sit up and beg bikes, plastic flowers adorning their baskets, gingham check plastic seat covers. The longest femurs in the world.

We passed a dusty shop window in which the sole item on display was the severed leg of a mannequin, wearing a black stocking. I took a photo and then noticed that some wag had signed it in chalk on the wall next to the window frame ‘Man Ray ‘07’.



At Noordemarkt we saw a man selling glass and tile cutters. He demonstrated the efficiency of the tool to an enthralled crowd, cutting glass and tiles without a hitch. By the time we got there, he had only small fragments left. The cutters came with a guarantee that there was no way they would work anything like as well when you tried to cut a tile or a sheet of glass at home.

The market consisted, unsurprisigly, of a bewildering mosaic of stalls, some selling clothes, others ‘antiques’.One had the neck of a not very distinguished old guitar for sale, along with a His Master’s Voice type of record player.



At the button stall, I witnessed Jacky’s Assumption into heaven. All sorts of buttons, mostly round, but not all, different sizes, textures, patterns, finishes, colours. We spent a good half hour there, coming away with 40 Euros worth of buttons, three old postcards and an interesting label which I had bought because it had the word Surabaiya on it.




The Rijksmuseum

We walked all the way down to the Rijksmuseum. On the way we admired a lamp post which, like most of the others in Amsterdam, had ivy winding round it as part of the ironwork design. This particular lamp post also had a complete bicycle tyre on the ground around it.



Monday seems to be late-opening day, most of the shops being closed until after lunch. “The Rijksmuseum Is Open”, declared a huge sign on the front of the building. The museum is being refurbished and only one wing of it is open, showing an exhibition of the “Masterpieces” of the collection. The logo for this exhibition was a capital M. Boring or what? Anyway, we didn’t mind seeing only the masterpieces so bought a couple of entry tickets from a nice lady who sneezed violently. I said “Bless you”. She explained that if you sneeze three times in Holland, the sun will shine next day. She added that, in her experience, this never happens.



The first room had written on one of its walls “After the 80 years war (1568-1648), the Dutch expelled their Spanish rulers and established an independent state”. I think the Spanish ruled at that time basically because of marriage with Hapsburgs. During the 80 years war, Amsterdam first supported Spain. Then, after about 10 years, Amsterdam switched allegiance in 1578 in a U-turn known as ‘The Alteration’. After this, the city was very definitely Protestant, as the Reformation spread through most of northern Europe.

The first two paintings I looked at were large canvases of sea battles made using pen and ink. I’d never seen this technique before - it seems to produce a sort of cloudy, ghostly look. Both were painted by Willem van der Welde, an early war-artist who travelled with the Dutch fleet, made sketches as the battles were happening and later worked them up into large paintings in his studio. ‘The Battle of Terheide, painted in 1657, must be at least ten feet wide and about eight feet high. It depicts hundreds of ships, going back into the distance (i.e. higher up on the canvas) and records the blockade that English ships put on Dutch harbours in 1653. During the battle, the Dutch commander Maarten Tromp was killed.

The second of van der Welde’s pen paintings is ‘The Battle of Livorno’, painted a few years after the event in 1655. It shows the English ship ‘Samson’ going up in flames after being hit by a shot from the Dutch man o’ war ‘De Haalve Maan’, captained by Cornelius Tromp. There are masses of English sailors in the water, a jumbled crowd of them tumbling down, some clinging to burning masts. Horrendous. Each figure is carefully represented and, although the painting is several feet wide and high, the figures are each only about three inches tall. On the stern of the ‘Samson’ is a slick graphic motif of ‘The Man In The Moon’...

Then an allegorical painting, 1614, by Adriaen Pieterz van der Verme, depicting the competition between Protestants and Catholics to win the souls of ordinary Dutch people. The Protestants wear black while the Catholics wear monkish habits. The Protestants in their boat, and the Catholics, including a Bishop with his mitre, fish from their boats, using nets to try to catch the peoples’ souls. On the left bank, the Protestant reformers, on the right bank the Papists, the old religion.

In a cabinet we saw some artefacts associated with the Dutch colonial exploits, objects owned or stolen by the merchants of the Dutch East India Company, claimed to be the largets trading company in the world at that time. One of the early multinationals. The object that caught my attention was a slender wooden box about 20 inches long, made in either South India or Sri Lanka, somewhere between 1675 and 1700. The outside surfaces of the box were decorated with finely carved ivory plates. The carved plates were fixed to the box later and mainly showed floral motifs. It was actually a case to contain one of the characteristic long-stemmed pipes that you see in old Dutch paintings. The label said “Dutch merchants smoked their pipes wherever they went”.

The Dutch West India Company, the DWI, is referred to in several of the works on display. The DWI operated in Brasil, Suriname and one or two other places in the Caribbean region, as well as in North America. They traded in furs, gold, sugar and slaves. Something to be proud of.

Next, I studied a painting done in 1680 by Melchior d’Hondecoeter, an artist who specialised in the representation of birds. An undercoater. This picture showed a pelican, some ducks, a casuary, a flamingo and an African crowned crane (as far as I can remember, the national bird of Uganda). The painting was commissioned by stadholder Willem III and was intended for Het Loo Palace, where Willem and Mary had a menagerie of exotic animals.

Then a violin, complete with strings, made of earthenware, faience, around 1705. The violin is covered back, front and sides with the Dutch tile blue. On the belly, a picture of people dancing in a dance hall, on the back a fiddler plays in front of an inn. I started to wonder how resonant it would be if played, and then read the label which said it was just an ornament and not meant to be played.

A beautiful still life of fruit, flowers and shells, painted in 1671 by Balthasar van der Arst. And then an amazing rendition of fine lace in Rembrandt’s 1639 painting of a young woman called Maria Trip. Meindert Hobbema paintings like the landscapes you see from the train between Rotterdam and Amsterdam. When I was 16 one of my favourite paintings was Meindert’s “Road with Poplars”, only seen in not very good reproduction in a Thames and Hudson World of Art book. Lots of roads with poplars in rural Essex, too. Next, a portrait of Ephraim Bueno, a renowned 17th century physician and scholar. I think Ephraim may have been one of the Sephardi Jews.

Next, a most memorable small painting. A little crowd of people stood in front of Vermeer’s “The Kitchen Maid”, transfixed. It was like a magnet, drawing the viewer into its calmness. The only movement in the painting is the stream of milk being poured from a jug. The colours, half blue, half light grey/ochre just sit together and send out a feeling of spiritual balance. Hypnotic.

We looked at some Pieter de Hooch and Paul Sanredam. Jacky said “It’s quite nice to see these paintings of the streets because they’re just like the streets we’ve just walked down”.

In the end I wondered why there were no Breughels. It was because Breughel was Flemish, mostly Belgium, rather than Dutch. I don’t think there are many Breughels in Belgium either. Vienna’s probably best.

The Boulevard of Broken Dreams

That evening, we had a drink outside a cafe in Nieuwmarkt to the sound of a very bad, very loud band playing in the square. On one of the bars in the square was written “Boulevard des Reves Brises”, rather Dylanesque, I thought.

Later we had a meal in an unusually spacious (for Cramsterdam) Vietnamese restaurant on the picaresque Zeedijk. Broken dreams, drunken sailors.

Our Dear Lord in the Attic

The next morning, we had breakfast at Molly Malone’s again, cramped, little elbow room. Bland slices of Edam with boiled eggs, a strange environment full of sleepy people,Sting still straining on “Message in a Bottle”, in his strangulated voice, Sue Lawley again and Desert Island Discs. “In this desert that I call my soul, You always play the starring role”. Melodramatic or what?. Sting would choose all his own songs to take to the desert island.

Jacky deftly pilfered several rolls, eggs, slices of cake that we would need on our journey home. The three Japanese people sitting at our table politely took no notice. They were actually concentrating hard on their fourth and fifth frankfurters and their mounds of scrambled egg. The climax of Jacky’s performance came when she snatched the largest apple, in a daring raid on the fruit bowl, on our way out, dextrously transferring it to her bag to join the other victuals sectreted therein. During breakfast, she also found time to clarify the meaning of the word ‘popinjay’ for me. As I said, I’ve been reading C.J.Samson’s “Sovereign”, which I’d strongly recommend to friends with a historical bent.

We went to see a canalside house where, in 1663, a hosiery merchant called Jan Hartman built a church in his attic. His wife, Lysbeth Jans, came from a family of compass makers. A big demand for compasses at that time.

In the drawing room was a box bed. People didn’t have separate bedrooms in those days and some say that they slept sitting up. It was certainly a very short bed. There was also a cabinet with painted panels depicting scenes in the life of the Prodigal Son, who had “squandered his inheritance and returned home to a loving father”. This reminded us a bit of John. One of the panels showed the son being enthusiastically prodigal, his arm around a young woman, his hand squeezing her bare breast as she holds a glass of wine in her hand while a cellist and a violinist serenade the fun-loving couple.

At the top of the otherwise domestic house was a perfectly formed Catholic church. This was the Reformation yet, in tolerant Amsterdam, the authorities turned a blind eye to Catholics worshipping, even though Catholicism was officially banned. It was OK as long as the building in which they worshipped didn’t look like a Catholic church.

To me, the church looked surprisingly big. Most of the space was taken up by rows of chairs, which could accomodate something like 150 members of a congregation. The altar was ornate. Around the walls hung paintings about ‘The Assumption of the Virgin’ and ‘The Lamentation of Christ’. Some putti, with a label which read ‘Twee Putti’ in Dutch. And a pulpit that could swivel back into a recess behind the altar, to save space.

Behind the altar, we looked into a cabinet that contained three crucifixes in bottles, like ships in bottles. Sting’s breakfast message made flesh. Also, some rosary beads. In Dutch, a rosary is a rosencrantz, apparently. It made me wonder what guildernstern meant. It then made me wonder what ‘Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead’ meant. Did it mean that rosaries are dead, that the Protestants have won? One rosary had large beads in the form of skulls, ten smaller beads in between the larger ones.

We also learnt about the Miracle of Amsterdam which happened in 1345. A sick man had vomited after being given the wafer during his last rites. The vomit, including the eructated body of Christ, was thrown into the fire in the sick man’s house. The wafer, miraculously, refused to burn. This was considered to be seriously meaningful, so much so that the wafer was taken to the Oude Kirke for safe keeping. But, again miraculously, the wafer re-appeared in the house of the sick man. Once again it was taken back to the Oude Kirke. After a while, it turned up once more in the sick man’s house. He couldn’t get rid of it. I don’t know if the sick man died in the meantime, while all this transsubstiation was going on, but I wouldn’t have blamed him. Anyway, this was the Amsterdam Miracle and people from around Holland and further afield started to make pilgrimages to Amsterdam to celebrate the wafer’s strange behaviour. Incredible, really. Still, it was only 1345 and most people were pretty stupid then.

In the two kitchens downstairs were some charming faience tiles on the walls. Blue drawings, thin lines, on off-white backgrounds, Delft blue, just one small figure or an animal in the centre of each tile. Wikipedia explains that “faience is the conventional name in English for fine tin-glazed pottery on a delicate pale buff body. The invention of a pottery glaze suitable for painted decoration, by the addition of an oxide of tin to the slip of a lead glaze, was a major advance in the history of pottery”.

This technique for tin-glazed earthenware was brought to Andalucia by the Moors. Later, some of this was exported from Southern Spain to Italy, often via the island of Majorca, from which majolica gets its name. By the late fifteenth century, tin-glazed earthenware was being made in Italy, particularly in the town of Faenza, the French for which is ‘Faience’. Apparently, “a painted majolica ware on an opaque white ground” was exported from Faenza not long afterwards. Some of this Italian faience was imported by the Dutch, who soon began to make their own, particularly in the town of Delft. Delftware is usually decorated in blue on a white or off-white background. This, in turn, was influenced by the blue and white porcelain that was
imported into Holland from China in the early sixteenth century.

This museumhouse is called the Amstelkring or “On’s Lieve Heer op Solder”, Our Dear Lord in the Attic. It also had a confessional. Today, you can go into the bit where the guilty sinner would have sat and looked through the screen towards a latent peadophile. But you can’t go into the bit where the priest would have sat. A sheet of clear perspex across the front, securing the imbalance of power that has endured through the centuries.

An old dream





As we left Oudezidjes Kolk, teams of men, in orange overalls, were putting up orange bunting and orange balloons all the way down the Zeedijk, ready for Queen’s Day. On the train going back to Rotterdam, we again saw lots of herons, ditches, dykes and diggers. Between Vlaardingen and Maasluis I noticed a cruise ship with a reproduction of the Mona Lisa printed on its huge funnel. Weird. The ship was named ‘Mona Lisa’. Cruise ship aesthetics.



We arrived at the Hoek in good time so decided to have a quick look round the small town. Would it be a mirror image of Harwich? As we left the station, we were greeted by some sheep.



We had a drink in the nearest bar, the Cafe Prins Hendryk. This, for me turned out to be a memorable experience but it’s not easy to explain it well. I had once, or maybe more than once, a dream in which I was in a bar in Holland. I grew up in Harwich and my dad often piloted the ferry to the Hoek of Holland so throughout my childhood there was mention of The Hoek. It’s also to do with illustrations in school text books. Line drawings of Dutch people, a farmer with a cap on and a bulbous, friendly Dutch potato-nose, with canals and windmills and cows in the background, perhaps in a geography book, maybe in the “Learn Dutch!” book that I once got out of the local library circa 1961, maybe avatars of the illustrations in our school French books, schoolboy stereotypes. This sort of stuff all mixed together. I pushed open the door of the Prins Hendryk and there I was, in that dream, those recollections, those fifty year old associations. Not deja vu, though, something quite different. Wonderful.



Old-style, lots of wood, everything wood except the things that were made of brass or glass. A seafaring theme, not even a theme, nothing so self-conscious, just a bar in the Hoek of Holland. I just felt so strongly that my dad had drunk in this place more than once. The barman was one of those line drawings, too. He brought me a beer and the special offer Koffie mit Appelgeback for Jacky. Black and white photographs of old ships and ferries decorated the walls in a way unnecessarily as the whole place was like a ship, like my dream.

As we sat there, me in a sort of happy trance, a fat woman played on a gambling machine, taking deep drags on a cigarette and looking somewhat unhealthy. She was wearing anoutdoor sports type jacket with the word ‘Annapurna’ written on the logo on her sleeve. Wearing her heart attack on her sleeve, I thought, childishly.

A young woman, local, just like Harwich people are in Harwich, confident in their smallworld security, was just going out of the door, in her unsporty grey tracksuit when the barman said something to her, probably about her swollen belly. She turned round sharply and, laughing, proudly displayed her distended body, at which the barman shouted “Sexy!”. Another little Hoek van Hollander on the way.

We wandered out and toward the ferry, noticing some bandy-legged bikers in full leathers and enjoying the signs everywhere that said “Ein Prettige Reis”. We had a pretty journey.