Water music

I think someone made a mistake when our arrival date was set for yesterday afternoon, since we have no rehearsals today. But it's great for me as I remember almost nothing from my choir visit 12 years ago and I wanted to see round Leiden. My mild disappointment at being allocated hosts away from the centre vanished last night when I got to know my lovely family and today they lent me a bicycle and J and the children took me on a cycle trip into and around the city. I find cycling on the right pretty easy but I had to concentrate hard to be aware of all the places that others might be coming from. 

There was masses to take in and I'm sure I have forgotten some of the places I saw, but the first thing that really impressed me was the underground, monitored bike storage where we parked our bikes. This is a place that treats cyclists as if they matter.

We saw the houses that were built after Rembrandt's birthplace was demolished in the 1970s (oops) and, just across the water, a replica of the mill where his father worked. The 70s was when Oxford nearly got a motorway through Christ Church meadow and many other towns didn't manage to resist the obsessive demolish-the-Middle-Ages lobby. Mad times.

We were invited into a gallery that my hosts had never visited, in a 17th century house lined everywhere with the old blue & white tiles for which the Netherlands is famous. We were told that tiles were used everywhere not for the sake of decoration but because they made cleaning so much easier. That reminded me of working in Chiswick Town Hall long ago, whose 19th century tiles up to shoulder height were because they could be hosed down after the unwashed had leant against the walls.

I'd been talking with the children about how much taller people are nowadays and showed them a tile-lined alcove-bed too short for any of us to fit into. But I was corrected: people used to sleep sitting up because they thought the devil could steal their souls if they slept lying down.

We walked along some canals and over some bridges, including one with an ancient market building still in use. J recognised some brass-playing coming from the direction of the canal and raced us over to the bank to see a man alternately playing a trumpet and a horn as he steered his a highly decorated boat to and fro in front of his audience. At one point he stopped to allow a carillon from the Town Hall to take over, then they alternated, clearly in well-practised cahoots.

Before going back for our bikes, we visited the Burcht - a walled keep on a mound which might originally have been defensive but which lost that purpose when the town grew up around it and it ended up almost in the centre of the city. 

I wonder how much I'll remember if I come back twelve years from now.