Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme

I did look up whether you can fry eggs in olive oil (what do I know after all?); the consensus is that you can do this in whatever kind of fat or oil you like. Before carrying out the experiment, however, I felt that I had to deserve this treat, so I decided to go for a run first - it being sunny, though very windy.

What is more, in the spirit of experimentation I decided to try out a new route. This was only partially successful, as after faithfully following one of the ubiquitous Public Footpaths, I landed in a field from which there was no discernible exit. I was convinced that I had not missed a sign. After walking the edge of the field I found a gap that had definitely been used before by humans, though equally certainly it was not an official path. I don't know how this right-of-way thing works, if a gap like this stays in existence for a hundred years, is it then an official footpath?

I was not yet entirely out of the woods, as the grounds I had now entered very clearly belonged to a golf club. In England these tend to be a bit more commonplace than in the Netherlands, but still I did not feel comfortable at the thought of irate golf players and golf balls zooming past my head, snitch style - as happened to my father once when we were walking in Scotland, though not on purpose I am sure. I kept very carefully to the rough and out of the way of groups of golfers until I found the exit. The club stems from 1906, which lends it a respectable age - quite a bit older yet than the Golfclub Driene in Hengelo, which has been in existence since 1926 and is said to be one of the oldest in the Netherlands. However, there is an public road across, not just a footpath but a bridleway no less, so I might do some more exploring, making sure to keep to the tarmac.

After geting home safely, I broke my fast very pleasurably on my well-deserved eggs. Of course I have an electric hub which takes forever to heat up and longer yet to cool down, and is far from horizontal to boot, but I managed this simplest of dishes all the same. Next time I will use less oil.

At this point I was faced with a dilemma. I had felt, and the weather service confirmed, that it was really very windy, not good cycling weather. There were also some showers predicted for the middle of the day. Reason enough to look for some other way to spend the day and still see something more of the surroundings of York. In the meanwhile I had a boundary condition: I have booked a ticket for the Festival of Remembrance,  a concert which was scheduled to start at 19:00, so whatever I planned to do had to take that into account.

At this moment any British reader of this blog will have picked up on that word "remembrance", and started wondering what I thought I would be doing there. Bear with me. For the others, I'll keep you in suspense for another 7 hours of my time.

Scarborough

Scarborough beach

On the list of places that my colleagues thought I absolutely had to see was the town of Whitby, in the Yorkshire Moors to the northeast. There are supposed to be fabulous walks there, and a famous bike trail to Scarborough running over an abandoned and dug-up railroad track (poetically called the "cinder track", national cycle route no. 1). Whitby turned out to be impossible to reach by train and be back in time, but Scarborough is less than an hour from York, with a regular though not too frequent service (every two hours). A bonus was that the weather was supposed to be better there: same wind but no showers. So off to Scarborough I went, planning to walk north a bit along the coastal footpath, and then south again along this bike trail.

I had no idea what to expect. In fact I did not even know before this that Scarborough is a coastal town. But there it was, spectacular cliffs, ruin of an old castle, sandy beaches (as a Dutchman you expect nothing else but I've come to realise this is a rarity in England); obviously no beach fun in November but prettily coloured beach houses. I think the epithet "fair" is fair.

The Cinder Track

It was a nice walk. I could see that the coast gets wilder up north, where Whitby must lie, but also on this stretch the sun, sky, rolling hills, cliffs and North Sea made for a memorable view. My only problem was to decide when to turn off the coast and start back again. Here I misjudged, as I often do, in favour of a slightly longer route that would allow me to see just a little bit more. The trouble lies in the world "slightly": when this turns out to be three quarters of an hour, then catching a train suddenly changes from easy to almost impossible. Getting the next connection would mean arriving at the concert about 5 minutes in advance, not desirable.

Volkswagen Station

The railroad track-turned-bike trail is certainly worthwhile, I look forward to trying it out in its entirety. Getting an early train to Whitby should do the trick, but I would have to plan this well in advance. As a bicyclist you are not often blessed with such a level and straight track, with sturdy overpasses and tunnels at many road crossings. There is something very appropriate about one iron horse making way for another. Having seen this, I am now actually convinced that some of the bike paths in York are also converted railroad tracks: a lot of those, built in the railroad heydays of the 19th century, were abandoned in the 1960s in a move popularly called the "Beeching Axe" which did away with 50% of all stations (!) in Great Britain (Beeching being the name of the person responsible for this plan).

Catching the train was very very tight. I saw a sign saying 6,5 miles to Scarborough when I had less than an hour left, which would be impossible to make so I suspended my belief in the sign. My smartphone GPS came in handy here to estimate the remaining distance. At some point I had half an hour left and decided that there was nothing for it but to jog the rest of the way, so that is what I did. I must have looked rather ridiculous; but no matter, I made the train with 2 minutes to spare!

Remembrance

A few weeks ago, when I was still worried that I would be sitting alone in my room evening after evening with nothing to do, I went through a leaflet called "what's on in York" or the like and picked out some events that looked worthwhile. One of them was this Festival of Remembrance, which offered a military band and several choirs. I did not bother to find out the background and booked a ticket online.

When I arrived at the York Barbican where this was going to take place, after having eaten something and exchanged some articles of clothing for dryer ones (which was absolutely necessary even after one hour of train), I felt distinctly underdressed, underage and out of my depth. Most of the audience were silver-haired insofar they were haired at all, and dressed as for an opening night, which I had not expected given the modest ticket prices and the local choirs advertised. More worrying yet were the sharply uniformed representatives of the military, present in impressive numbers, medals and all. Most worrying of all were the little British flags that a lot of the audience, old and young, were carrying around. Belatedly I started realising that this unusual word "remembrance" might stand for an unusual occasion, and from there to the realisation that this might well have to do with commemorating the World Wars was not such a big leap.

The all-knowing internet quickly confirmed this. The Dutch have no First World War to commemorate, having been neutral; and I remember that Geert Mak in his book My Father's Century points out how much this sets us apart, without us even realising it, from almost the entire rest of Europe, where it has often left much deeper (even though less recent) scars than the Second. This is certainly true of England, where the Great War will forever refer to WW1. And so it is that the day of remembrance, which for the Dutch is determined by the end of WW2, here is determined by the end of WW1, nominally on the 11th of November. No doubt scheduling issues have led to this concert being early.

Anyone?

All in all, an evening like this is quite an education. As a concert it was OK, more or less what you would expect from the Main St. Ladies Barbershop Singers, the Heavy Cavalry & Cambrai Band or the York Military Wives Choir. There was some parading at the beginning and the end, which I had also come to expect by then. There was some communcal singing of wartime songs, which was a surprise. I think I held my own, except for the White Cliffs of Dover which was new to me. Enthousiastic flag waving ensued at the performance of Rule Brittannia, confirming that the English are much more unashamedly patriottic than the Dutch. The biggest surprise was the religious service at the very end, up to and including the singing of hymns, which are fortunately slow and simple enough so you don't have to know them to be able to sing along.

Final thoughts of the day

This has become a long post, as befits a long day. Writing up my experiences is time-consuming but a very interesting exercise for myself: I have found out that it is a way of consolidating what I have seen and done. Impressions and thoughts are fleeting, but grab one before it is gone and write it down, and it becomes truth.