July 31, 2015
Sluis, Holland: Brake block drama
I HAVE grown convinced that my front brake will fail and send me into a canal. Things like that concentrate a man's mind, even if the evidence is slight. Why all this worry? Because, peering down through all the clutter of my bike, the blocks looked dangerously thin.
As it happens, they weren't that thick in the first place, but I want to replace them and, here at least, I can make myself understood.
I got off to a sticky start this morning. I think I slept so deeply last night that I had trouble coming round. This was remedied - is there any other way? - with a stop for coffee in one of those anonymous Belgian towns that has a canal, several bars and no end of curious businesses that elsewhere would be down side streets or on industrial estates.
One of the delights of Belgium, or one of the frustrations, is its haphazard nature. Most places would have streets where every building was a shop, or a house, or a factory. That's how it is in the Lego-like efficiency of Holland. Not so to the south of the border, in Belgium. Walk through town and you'll pass three houses, a tyre-fitting business, a gap where something used to be but nobody remembers what, a place selling knitting wool, two more houses and then a bar.
It may not be uniform but it does mean you have only to walk down any road in Belgium and you'll find what you're looking for.
This morning's bar, already busy, was chattily full of men in overalls and patterned cardigans. They were talking football or, the other passion of small-town Belgium, pigeons. Look behind the houses in Belgium, I sometimes think, and you'll find that one in five has a shanty pigeon house tacked to the back.
Nobody in the bar knew of a bike shop in town, so I rode on. I stopped in a prettier place down the road and presented myself to a man sitting on a bench with nothing pressing to do.
He answered in English.
"Got a holiday home here, see", he explained. "Other people buy places in Spain. But nothing beats Belgium. Not unless you want sun, of course. Don't get a lot of that in Belgium."
By happy chance, he rode a bike. Ride down the road, he said, and there'd be a bike shop behind a garage at the crossroads. Failing that, I could carry on towards Bruges and there'd be a succession of them, each better than the one before.
Well, I'm not going to bore you any more with brake block stories, but all this does explain how I came to be riding through the beautiful city of Bruges when I'd had no intention of being there.
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It's an outdoor museum, Bruges, maybe the most beautiful place on earth. And the odd thing is that only a few decades ago it was unknown. It was musty and crumbling, and people drank a lot of beer because you could do that indoors. To be outdoors exposed you to the blast of the North Sea just down the road.
The city council now has the tricky problem of managing a city which has a normal life of its own but an area that attracts millions of people a year. It does it well, but it can't be easy.
I crossed into Holland with nothing but a faint change of type on the road signs. Same language, same money.
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Groede, on the edge of Sluis - you say it Sloce, or close to that, anyway - was having its annual street market. Almost everyone had come by bike and long stretches of grass beside the roads had been set aside as a bike park. I read this morning that one in four working Dutchman gets to his job by bike.
The trouble, if trouble it is, is that they also go out for genteel rides in the countryside. Those on normal bikes are no problem. The snag comes when you come up behind a pair of extreme dignity and probity riding those big black bikes you see only in Holland. They aren't the least bit manoeuvrable but they can be ridden extremely slowly. You don't buy one if you want to ride fast and so, if you have one, you're disposed to ride like a snail. Although a very respectable snail.
And people like that resent being overtaken. You could overtake them at the speed of a pogo stick but that doesn't prevent their riding side by side and taking the whole of the obligatory bike path.
Dutch cyclists have little bells on their bike, which they ping to warn of their approach and to ask politely for right of passage. It sounds imperious but it's considered everyday in Holland, and even polite.
How often in their stately progress these couples are pinged into single file, I don't know. I think it must be a lot, though, because they scowl when it happens yet again. Especially the women. And they never seem to consider that they have brought the problem on themselves in the first place.
But, here I am, getting irrational. Car drivers get upset because cyclists travel slower than they do. And now I'm getting upset because some cyclists want to travel more slowly than me.
The Dutch for hypocrite is hypocrit. Its secondary meaning is "Ageing foreign cyclist grumpy after riding his bike so long."
Today's ride: 77 km (48 miles)
Total: 2,837 km (1,762 miles)
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