Here follows the course of a carefree spring day on a Wadden Island:
7.45 Get up. Shower. Wake Bo.
8.03 Go to the bakery. Fry eggs. Set breakfast table with fresh buns, orange juice and strong coffee.
8.28 Eat breakfast.
9.33 Finally finish breakfast. Leave all dirty dishes on the counter.
9.50 Go to the bike-hire place. Pick out a pair of sturdy Dutch two-wheelers.
10.04 Go cycling. Through the fields and along the dyke on the shallows side, to Nes. Gambolling lapwings, hysterical godwits, a flight of wigeons, two Nile geese in a long, straight, grey ditch. ‘If you could choose between the Nile and this ditch . . .’ ‘If you could choose between Amsterdam and Ameland . . .’ ‘Then I’d still be glad we live in Amsterdam.’
11.28 A coffee shop in Buren. Just when we’ve found a seat, in come the five young people we saw yesterday on the mudflats. ‘See any more seals this morning?’ the same boy asks. ‘Don’t pay any attention to him,’ says the same girl – the girl with the black baseball cap. ‘Are you staying here in Buren?’ ‘No, in Hollum.’ ‘Is that nice, Hollum?’ ‘Yeah, quite nice.’ ‘Is there anywhere to go out at night?’ ‘Ummm . . . well, we only got here yesterday.’
12.15 We’re ready to leave. ‘Bye,’ says Bo. ‘Ciao.’ ‘See you,’ says the girl with the cap. ‘She was flirting with you,’ I say when we get outside. ‘Ar-min,’ Bo sighs.
12.43 Walk across the sand at Het Oerd. Black scoters beyond the breakers. A sick rabbit, waiting for a buzzard or a fox. Waiting for death. Bo finds the skull of a seagull, clean and completely intact. He puts it in his tin.
13.30 Lunch atop a dune. ‘What do you think, shall we blow up that production platform?’ ‘Good idea.’
14.07 Back to the bikes. We head west, on the lee side of the dune. Late-brooding fieldfares. Hoping for a short-eared owl, but all we see is a buzzard, flapping low over the grassland in semi-successful mimicry – semi-successful, because I stop anyway and pull out my binoculars. ‘Buzzard,’ I say to Bo. ‘I thought so.’ Show-off, I think. But I say nothing.
14.50 Close to Ballum, a short side-trip to the beach. Dead jellyfish. Sanderlings. Bo finds a skate’s egg, I find a right shoe. How does it go again? In England, more left shoes are found on the North Sea Coast; in Holland and Belgium, more right shoes – or was it the other way around? In any case, it had something to do with the current and the specific streamlining of left and right shoes. We agree that, however it went, it had to be the other way around.
15.34 Back on the bikes. We head ‘home’.
16.09 In the village we buy a bottle of whisky and a couple of beers. Plus a copy of Voetbal International and Bild Zeitung.
16.16 Home. Reading. A drink close at hand. ‘Feyenoord disappoints loyal fans’. ‘Schadenfreude in Bonn’.
18.30 ‘What are we going to eat?’ I awake with a start. ‘Let’s go out.’ ‘Good idea.’ ‘Where?’ ‘Here in the village.’ ‘Sole Picasso.’ ‘Something like that. Sea wolf?’ ‘Mullet.’ ‘Outstanding.’
19.07 A local restaurant with seascape murals and fishing nets hanging from the ceiling. ‘I’d like the Sole Picasso.’ ‘And I’d like the gurnard in mild mustard sauce. And a carafe of white wine, please.’
That kind of day. The kind of day that in no way prepares you for what the night will bring.