The Scarlet Runners

Let’s rewind a little bit. Before I went to Holland last month I walked into an op shop in Port and had one of those “heavens open up while angels sing with illuminating beams of light” moments. You know the ones. Anyway, the illuminating beams of light fell upon a maroon suit - pure wool, twelve dollars, and when I tried it on, trembling with excitement at my find, I was delighted to find it fitted me like a glove. Well. it fits me fairly well, perhaps a teensy bit tight, but never let the truth get in the way of a good story. When I wear it I look like a cross between David Tennant and a 70s pimp, which, strangely enough, is probably pretty similar to how I feel.

Fast forward now to last weekend and I’m wearing my suit again, sitting by a campfire near the New South Wales coast at 3am in the morning. In the light of the full moon and the fire I’m playing guitar and singing Gillian Welch songs while my friend sits beside me playing her violin and singing harmonies. This is where heaven resides on earth. Earlier in the night we had our first gig, together with the rest of our band, The Scarlet Runners. Despite dodgy sound and lots of nerves and fuck-ups from me I still regard it as an auspicious beginning. We make a happy sound and it’s hard to go wrong when you’ve got a banjo plunking along with guitar, violin, and mandolin. I do wish I hadn’t played the whole gig with a head torch on my hat though.

We’ve been playing together for about six months now, doing the things that new bands do – eating curries, lots of tuning up and trying to decide on a name. More than anything though we bring songs to suck and see, our favourites slowly getting polished through regular use. I am in the middle of a burst of energy for musical polishing, feeling like the archetypical housewife from a 1950s cleaning advert - Doris Day in elbow length gloves, headscarf and a cheeky wink. Maybe a bit less Doris Day and a bit more of a whip cracking Annie Get Your Gun, trying to sculpt the sounds in my head, along with three part harmonies. And feeling.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we’re starting the big push to get the roof on Angela and Ken’s house. Big stacks of timber sit alongside the hardwood verandah carcass, and every day we work at making the piles smaller and the house bigger. Of course I am using one of the more elastic definitions of “we”, as I’ve strained my back and I’m having a self-imposed hiatus, leaving the work to the workers whilst I sip mint juleps and write blog posts. Even Em is slogging away in the garden as I sit here contemplating another lie down.

Transformed

My roommate can dance tango. The days are for biking and singing but by night we follow our noses and explore grachts and churches and cobblestoned streets. Not unlike a sheep I faithfully follow Theo as he navigates us through the old cities looking for interesting sights and sounds. Last night our wanderings found a Spiegeltent, which was part of a tango festival in town. To begin with I did my usual trick of running a mile but he slowly reeled me in and before long Vicki, Susie and I were sitting in a booth surrounded by tight skirts and intense looks, hot bodies and sultry moves, wondering where Theo had got to. The music danced the knife edge between frantic and controlled, accordion running and falling and up again, tripping over the bass and drums and then leaving them behind.


And then there he was. In the centre of the dancers, a woman in his arms. Holding her, leading her, guiding her confidently around the floor. A man amongst men.

Elly says the weather is unusual as it hasn’t rained the whole tour. The last couple of days we have been riding through sand dunes under bright blue skies, stopping to eat chips and swim in the North sea. By lunch yesterday we were in Haarlem and I went looking for second hand stores and antique shops. I have been finding lots of treasure and if it’s cheap enough and small enough and I’m feeling a little crazy I just buy it. It’s not often I’m in Holland.


Late afternoon we had a workshop in a Mennonite church, a big resonant space that could support both the rich, resonant basses and the soaring, angelic sopranos, along with a touch of echo. We give ourselves, our voices and our trust, to Rachel and she slowly, deliberately, gently weaves us together until we have been transformed into a giant willow sculpture, moving in the wind. A choir. And not just any choir but a community choir. We are the folk and this is the music we make, no union card required. And it is beautiful.

Cheese and churches

My father was fairly rigid, controlled and controlling so I treasure my gentle memories of him, the intimate moments. Our Dutch guide on this trip, Bert, reminded me of one of these memories and now I’m sitting in Gouda, disinterested in cheese and churches but with tears in my eyes, feeling connected to something from a long time ago. One of those deep places inside.


As kids my brothers and I used to play a game with Dad where we would draw pictures or letters on each other’s backs with our fingers and the person would have to guess what it was. A deep, treasured memory brought back to the light in Gouda. Bert reminded me, talking of the games he plays with his grandchildren and how they learn their letters in school this same way.


As we sit and talk we drink coffee and eat stroopwafels. Stroop is like golden syrup and a stroopwafel has a layer sandwiched between two very thin round waffles. They are slightly larger than the top rim of your coffee cup, which is where they sit to warm up or if they have gone a little stale.


I think this is what I look for in my travels, moments where something personal collides with something local. Like childhood memories and stroopwafels. It doesn’t seem to happen for me in churches or museums so I don’t usually bother going to them anymore.


The weather is beautiful, never truly cold, even when out walking after dinner or climbing a tree. The evenings only slowly give up their light, the colours softening slowly in the gradually fading light. Another delight is having the landscape change without having to change beds.

The Dutch are nice people. I’ve had ideas of national character and landscape bumping together in my head, trying to work out how they fit together. Everywhere is reclaimed marsh, the water pumped up and over the dykes, as it still is today. Not exactly prime real estate so why did the Dutch end up here when they could potentially have ended up somewhere else? My theory is because they are so friendly and polite they ended up giving everyone else first pick of the prime spots to settle.


One of the consequences of such flat land is that everyone rides bikes, which further imbues the Dutch psyche with both a fairly down to earth quality, as well as democracy. It’s hard to be a bastard and make your exit on a bike. And democratic because everyone rides bikes. Old women in long flowing dresses, young girls in miniskirts, men in suits, mums on cargobikes with the kids and the shopping in the front. Is this why it’s so rare to see anyone overweight?


A lack of curtains is typical here, almost as though you are being invited to look in, which I do. And then they take it further by adding ornaments and flowers, supplementing voyeurism with aesthetics. All these observations and thoughts come to me as we ride along, chatting and enjoying each other’s company – learning new songs, singing in windmills, waiting for bridges to let boats through, riding along dykes, eating chocolate for breakfast. Bliss really. Exactly what you want from a holiday.

Except for the sore bum.

A hofje in the rear

OK. To set the scene: I’m in a coffeshop, waiting for my washing to finish down the road. I’m writing this but I’m also finding myself transfixed by a show on the automated process of making icecream cones. The guy running the place seemed to be fairly cool but I’m reconsidering, based on how much he’s enjoying a story he's reading in his newspaper about a new fish they’ve discovered in the Mekong Delta, Phallostethus cuulong.

There’s this one Dutch girl I kept seeing everywhere wearing pale green jeans. She was really getting around too, managing to not just keep up with me but consistently end up getting to where I was going before me. It was getting far too co-incidental, straying into suspicious, until I realized the jeans were just trendy. A Dutch version of the scene from Good Morning, Vietnam.

I’ve spent the last few days wandering the streets of the Jordaan with Elly. The Jordaan is an old quarter near the centre of Amsterdam with lots of cool old buildings and history. I am so lucky to have a Dutch speaker to explore with. I probably should be going to museums and galleries but instead I’m drawn to the tie rods anchoring the facades of the local buildings to their frames. Functional, but then also a vehicle for both expression and demonstration of prestige.



Part of the fun with having Elly here is the added autobiographical context she has. She’s found her old car (wellllllll…), shown me some of the haunts from her youth, and insisted we eat traditional Dutch pub food, uitsmijter. When it arrived I thought we had been served a particularly shoddy version. How wrong I was, apparently this was the genuine article – zeer authentiek. Three fried eggs with melted cheese served on ham and white bread. Something to give the English a run for their money on the prestigious stage of world cuisine.



Working as a builder back home gives me a set of eyes to see the city through (hence the tie rods). Even without an interest in building it doesn’t take long to notice how out of whack all the buildings are. It’s not uncommon to see two buildings leaning in on each other, like a couple of drunks supporting each other to stay upright. Further down the street a building will be leaning forward into the street with each building behind it leaning slightly less until by about half a dozen houses down the facades are plumb again. Why are they like this? They had obviously been built before the hash cafes first opened so my next thought was that maybe they had been built during some sort of spirit level makers strike. These sorts of questions kept mounting up for Elly and me - Why is the water in the canals brown if no-one is polluting it anymore? Did they use to use horses to pull the barges? Why have some of the buildings been built using recycled bricks? We decided to go on a guided walking tour of the Jordaan.



It was really nice. We got answers to all our questions and got shown lots of interesting things. Like a stained glass workshop still in use and the hofje, little garden courtyards hidden behind an ordinary door on the street. A form of social welfare provided by the Catholic church (gardens were far too extravagant for the Protestants), with each courtyard surrounded by housing for old women. If I was going to spend more time in Amsterdam I would want a streetscape in the front of the apartment and a hofje in the rear.



Last night I went to a local outdoor film festival, Pluk de Nacht – Seize the night. They show films from international film festivals that didn’t make it to the Netherlands. It’s free to get in, free to get a deck chair and then they make their money on the food and drink. The location is on a flat concrete wharf, disused and covered in weeds and young, funky looking Dutch people. It was a Czech film shown with English subtitles so I was able to keep up, perhaps better than some of the locals, eating pizza and huddled in my chair against the cold wind.

Extra senoritas

I should be taking more pictures. Memories fade. Maybe writing about them will help fix them. The thing is I’m a lazy writer and I haven’t the dedication to thrash out every scene in detail. Instead I dab a few broad brushstrokes and let other people’s imagination do the rest.

I’m three days into my Holland adventure, staying in a little room at the top of the Seven Bridges Hotel, which is delightful. Around the corner from the hotel I’ve found a little Belgian café where I came on my first morning to try and erase the nightmare memories of plane food with the help of coffee and chocolate, croissants and baguettes. It’s a nice place to blog before wandering through town visiting bookstores and looking at interesting things.

The centre of Amsterdam is just Tourist Town, the same as every tourist town all over the world – albeit in a pretty Dutch setting. The culture becomes polarized, both trivialized and amorphous, either women in funny hats selling tulip bulbs or young guys yelling, selling coca cola, phone credit and trying to fill sprawling restaurants. But a short walk away things settle down a bit. The streets behind my hotel remind me of the west end of Fremantle, big old buildings with big windows shoulder to shoulder on wide streets. Except with canals and more bikes. So many bikes, including lots of cargo bikes. And lots of stylish Dutch people riding them.



Yesterday I got out of town and went to a big market in Beverwijk called De Bazaar. I caught the train through the countryside and of all things my eye was drawn to allotments and electric fence tape. It is the beginning of autumn and so the last of the summer crops are finishing and the slow winter crops are taking over valuable space.

The bazaar in Beverwijk was really big and not as good as I was hoping. But there were some gems. Well……two gems. And one of those wasn’t very good. Lots of stalls selling flashing plastic and cheap leather jackets. I had lunch at De Bazaar in an Arabic restaurant, just a cut above the kind of kebab shop I’d find back home only this one was filled with arabs eating lunch and drinking Moroccan mint tea. I sometimes have to remind myself to be a bit more adventurous and not so shy, otherwise I’ll end up just seeking out the familiar and missing the interesting things and experiences. The Moroccan tea was delicious.

In the food section I bought nectarines and Turkish pistachios to sustain me on my wanderings. Eventually I found an antique store where I couldn’t resist the “Extra Senoritas” cigar tins, along with strap on ice skates and a brass door bell. I also found a wooden folding ruler, not the sort of thing you can find in Australia as it unusually combines worn charm with the metric system.

The woman who ran the stall gave a little on the price, gave me the name of another shop to try in Amsterdam and invited me to feel her boobs. All in the name of science of course. She had hers done ten years ago and her friend had hers done twenty years ago and they were giving each other the squeeze test. With my darling wife in mind I politely declined, murmuring a few excuses and feigning disinterest. The Dutch really are good sorts.

The Making of Butter

So it has been a while hasn’t it? It’s not that we haven’t had anything to blog about for the last six months, we just got out of the habit. To bring people up to date : Noah has started school and is loving it. Ryan is working on building Angela’s house and thing are slowly moving forward. And I have been following my usual pursuits as well as finally making some butter!

I bought my butter churn online from a company in the USA that mainly supply the Amish. It’s a 10 litre electric churn called a Gem Dandy, and I love it.

The cream we are getting is very thick and has defeated my churn on the previous two attempts. This time around we added more milk to thin it up bit and it finally came good and made me some butter.

We started with around ten litres of cream and did half at a time adding milk by increments till we ended up adding around 2 litres. The first batch took a long time with much pleading and swearing. We must have finally said the right incantation because somehow it separated. We strained out the butter milk (and saved it to thin out the next batch) worked it, washed it, and salted it. Ryan had a stainless steel butter mould made up at a local steel fabricators for $60. It’s the same shape as a normal 250g stick of butter and it works like a dream.

I was very pleased with the butter from my churn, just like the real thing, only, of course, much better. I wrapped it in unbleached, chlorine-free baking paper and a little label that Ang and I couldn’t help but make up.

The whole thing is a joint effort with Ang and I couldn’t do it without her energy and logic, thanks sis!

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