I got on the train in Den Helder, the northernmost point of mainland North Holland, a province of the Netherlands, just me and my bike, on our way back to Amsterdam.
A woman cyclist about my age climbed aboard behind me and, before parking our bikes in the slots assigned to them, we discussed who would be getting out first and whose bike should go where. Then we sat on nearby seats and started to chat.
During my short visit to the Netherlands, my first in years, everyone I encountered had excellent English. The Dutch, qua linguists, are senior inter-county hurlers who put the mere Irish to shame. They are not our equals when it comes to warmly greeting strangers as a matter of course, but they are, I found, when it comes to chatting, comfortably in our league.
It turned out that both the woman and I had spent the day cycling around Texel, an island a few minutes by ferry (€6 return) from Den Helder.
Texel has flat cycle paths running inside the dunes that line the island’s west coast, and a flat windswept cycle path atop the dyke that lines the coast on its eastern side. The dyke keeps the shallow Wadden Sea away from the sheep grazing in the polders. A polder, by the way, is low-lying land surrounded by dykes. (I had to look it up).
The woman on the train, tall, gangly and obviously fit, was delighted when she heard I was Irish. She had been in New Zealand a few months earlier and had broken her ankle badly while out boating in rough seas.
She’d had to rest up, post-surgery, in a hotel, before flying home, and an Irish woman living nearby had befriended her, taking her out for walks (she was in a wheelchair at first) and even cooking for her. The woman’s kindness had obviously left the Dutch woman well disposed towards Irish people generally.
We chatted about her injury; where she lived, where she went on holidays, the short cycling trip I’d done from Amsterdam to Enkhuizen, and then on to Texel; what had brought me to the Netherlands, where we both liked to go on our holidays, and how we both liked swimming in the sea and did so as often as we could. If there is a shortage of trust in the contemporary world, chatting is surely the ne plus ultra of remedies.
The woman got out a few stops before Amsterdam Centraal, where I got off. It was dusk and I wanted to get to the bike rental shop before it closed, but I was nervous about cycling in the city. The Dutch character changes depending on whether they are on two legs or two wheels. They seem like such a clever, sensible bunch but, in the cities, they cycle as if they’ve all got Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD).
I walked my bike out of the station and on to a bridge over a narrow channel of water. I had been reading Russell Shorto’s Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City, and on the bridge I paused and looked around, as Shorto had suggested.
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Not far from the bridge is a house where, in 1602, people went to buy shares in the newly formed Dutch East India Company. An innovative aspect of the company was that people could trade in the shares, with rules governing how this process would work.
It was the world’s first stock market, and the early investors included not just wealthy merchants but also coopers, blacksmiths, cutlers and even housekeepers. According to Shorto, the trading mostly took place there, on the bridge, where I was standing, holding on to my bike.
These days the bridge is still a busy place, though you are more likely to be knocked down by a short-stay tourist with a 20kg hard-shell wheelie bag, or a Dutch cyclist, than by spooked investors trying to offload their shares.
Shorto says the mix of self-interest and collective endeavour required of a society that reclaimed land from the sea to distribute in private lots, was a key contributor to the liberalism that originated in the Netherlands and helped mould the world’s liberal democracies. That was news to me.
Having marvelled for a moment at the richness of history, I got on my bike and spent an exhilarating few minutes exploring my inner ASPD while cycling at speed through the darkened streets of old Amsterdam.
It was great fun and nobody came to any harm. At the bike rental shop, the woman in charge was anxious to lock up and go home. But then we started to chat – and a few minutes here or there didn’t seem like such a big deal.
