My goodness it has turned cold all of a sudden. I have just made a cup of peppermint tea and gobbled up two chocolate marshmallow things, and just feel so relieved I don’t have to go out and watch a bonfire or a display of fireworks. I shall happily forget the fifth of November with its gunpowder, treason and plot and concentrate instead in trying to remember the most wonderful month of October. It all began….

In Amsterdam.

The few days that we spent in this pretty, charming city, cross hatched like a quilt pattern, with watery canals and picturesque bridges I seemed to be permanently light headed.

The smell of the dopey weed was thick and invasive, and there really was no need to enter a ‘special’ coffee shop, for the air all around was free to breathe in the ‘happy’ fumes. We did sample a couple of bright green lolly pops, and it is with shame that I admit that I was still sucking mine when we entered the secret, hidden church of ‘Our Lord in the Attic’. The converted upper room was beautiful, and quite amazing, a place where Catholics could come to worship in a time when their faith was banned. It was so different from the ‘Secret Annexe’ where Jewish Anne Franke and her family hid from the Nazis. That was so pitiful, cramped and dark. When we queued for an hour it was raining. We bought an umbrella.

We found the city full of history and persecution, and we tried to see it all. We marched around the Van Gogh museum, the Rijks Museum, with so many pictures of Christian martyrs, particularly poor Saint Ursula who was put to death along with her 11,000 virgins, and poor St Sebastian with his body full of arrows.

We did find ourselves walking through The Red Light district, and we did try to avert our eyes from the stark reality of Sex for Sale but the girls stood inches from our faces. Beautiful girls, lithe and young, and it was all so awful. Just a shop window and a bed, and a curtain. It was so basic. We found out later that nine hundred girls are working every day, and sadly many working against their will, often the victims of physical and psychological violence.

We went into the Museum of Prostitution and there were stories of Hannah, Julie, Svetlana, all tricked and now trapped. We read of murders, and the fear of the pimps.

There was also a glass case with things that had been left behind, – spectacles, a sock, keys, and even a dental plate! So strange, I remember in Borneo in the museum, we read about a killer crocodile and  inside the giant croc’s stomach there was a similar array of objects. Weird what men leave behind and what they are remembered for.

But then we took the tram away from the tourist area, to an exhibition centre where we went to see the ‘The Art of the Brick’ by an amazing modern artist, Nathan Sawaya. It was fun, inventive, novel, and as we passed through the rooms of images, and large 3D shapes, we saw how he developed from a ‘copier’ to someone who tried to make the lego bricks ‘talk’ to us, and portray an emotion. There were splendid copies of the Venus de Milo, the Kiss, Whistler’s Mother, but then we moved away to things that portrayed pain, freedom, and the human need to ask why.

I have vague memories of playing with my own children, and only being able to make a small house.

We came away quite uplifted.

John was mesmerised by the bicycles … there were millions of them, and scary as hell. They just shoot about, fast as light and it was terrifying to cross the roads.

But it was fun in Amsterdam, just wandering, and buying tulips and looking at flowers and wandering through the flea markets and stopping to drink coffee or a glass of something.

On the morning that we left we went to the station, and in one area there was a grand piano, with a sign on it saying, ‘Play Me’. And some sweet girl was doing just that. It was beautiful.

John asked me, ‘Why don’t we do that?’ I was aghast.

I didn’t think we were that good. But of course he meant in our country. Ah, now that would be a good idea.

So farewell from the land of the clogs and the cheese and the tulips and the galleries. And on to Rome.

PS Just want to say that John has most of the photos on his camera, so I will have to wait till he sorts them then I can add others. I did love this sign hung in a café!