By Hildegard and Bas Van Ostaden / Brouwerij De Koningshoeven. 33cl, 11% ABV, serve at 10°

With their attractive little characters, Urthel beers aren’t difficult to spot on the shelves but this quadrupel is perhaps least common among them. The Van Ostadens claim to have served it at their wedding reception instead of wine, so that’s probably what makes it a bit exclusive.

As I wondered how their family and guests could have lasted the course of the event on stuff as strong as this, the first mouthful went some way to explaining the puzzle.

This is easily the lightest quad I’ve ever tasted – the fizzy tongue and all-round thinner mouthfeel seemed much more in keeping with a dubbel.

Some deeper, rooty flavours of woodsmoke and vegetables but surprisingly refined with a little bit of a sour finish and a very agreeable alcohol miasma. Here’s to you Hildegard and Bas!

A national holiday gave us the breathing space to disappear to the Netherlands for a couple of days.

The temperature was high. So was the pollen count.

Perfect conditions indeed for discovering the lush fields and stretching sands of these distinctive and historic regions.

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Zuid Holland and Zeeland

On the first hot weekend of 2009, we found ourselves in the Netherlands. Thankfully, cool waters were never far away, on the beaches and beside the canals.

Great grilled sausages

Paintings by genre specialists such as van Goyen, Ruisdael, van de Cappelle and Cuyp describe a peculiarly Dutch affinity for the sea. Some of these vast and expansive works were on show at a small and expensive museum in Den Haag’s Mauritshuis.

Moody pallettes and sweeping strokes evoke both the awesomeness of Nature and the bravery of Man. Indeed Vincent van Gogh, that singular Dutchman, once said:

The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore

Today on the beach at Scheveningen, as the high sun burns on mercilesslythroughout the afternoon, people remain ashore despite the dangers.

And all around are the splashed, lurid colours of cheap lycra and Chinese plastics. Like great grilled sausages, the Dutch struggle to expose every bit of skin within the limits of decency. On some, there are mottled patches of variegated pink skin, the scars of past campaigns sunbathing in Spain, Greece and the South of France.

Canalside dominoes

Gasthuislaan in Delft on a hot Saturday afternoon. It strikes me suddenly that I’d be perfectly capable of rolling over a parked car into the canal. Like a giant domino.

Because everywhere you go, there’s a car – or better, a crowd of cars – filling the viewfinder of your camera, stopping you crossing the road, gifting you the shitty, off-beer smell of their catalytic converters.

In this otherwise beautiful town, a good photo is one that somehow avoids all the cars and their junkfood diet of ugly road signs. In this town, the camera does lie. It has to.

Bruegel’s Tower of Babel (source: Wikimedia Commons)

The Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen is one of the better reasons to visit Rotterdam.

The city was endowed with Boijmans’ considerable collection in 1841 – the year of the benefactor’s death – after what appear to have been protracted negotiations. Business magnate van Beuningen’s donation just over a century later added impressively to his predecessor’s foundation.

Today’s consolidated collection is therefore broadly eclectic, with notable works by Flemish old masters including Bosch and Bruegel and surrealists such as Dalì and Magritte.

In addition to the main museum spaces, there were also other exhibitions, including an fascinating stash of medieval homeware. A large temporary exhibit showing the altermodern ramblings of Charles Avery told us little except that Avery needs to get out more.

Maybe I’m missing the point, but I’ve just about had enough of this art-as-masturbation stuff.

The self-image of the city is that of a no-nonsense workers’ city …. There is a saying: “Amsterdam to party, Den Haag (The Hague) to live, Rotterdam to work”.

So says the Wikipedia article on Rotterdam. Many of these workers drive to Rotterdam’s port, widened during the last century to maintain its position as the biggest in Europe.

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Rotterdam

Europe's largest port, the home of Erasmus and the Netherlands' second city.

Upriver in the city itself, there is something workmanlike about the place, marked as it is by a modern, urban architecture precipitated by the deleterious bombing campaign of 1940.

After the war and in desperate need of rebuilding, Rotterdam became something of a playground for Structuralism, a movement whose primary concerns are the cumulative, often repetitive effect of units (tesselation, patterns) and the utility of shared space.

Key structuralist developments can be found in the Oude Haven wijk, in which there are located several complexes for collective living. Elsewhere in Rotterdam are some of the Netherlands’ only examples of high-rise building. We stayed in one of them: the Westin hotel on Weena.

Rotterdam is also the home of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, with its impressive art collection.

British Second Army, XII Corps, 53rd (Welsh) Infantry Division, 158th Infantry Brigade, East Lancashire Regiment, 1st Batallion, Private 3459145.

This was Lawrence Padgett, twenty four years old, from Yeadon. On July 6th 1944, his battalion landed on Sword Beach at Normandy.

The battalion joined with other battalions to fight through France, into Belgium, heading for the Netherlands. On some days there was stiff resistance from tanks and infantry, on others nothing passed over the plains but the cold, constant wind.

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Bergen op Zoom War Cemetery

After landing in Normandy, 1st East Lancs headed up through Belgium to support Operation Market Garden.

Lawrence Padgett was my father’s father’s brother. Lawrence might have been my father’s uncle, but within two months of the landing he was killed.

Lawrence died on September 22nd 1944. His grave is at the Canadian War Cemetery in Bergen op Zoom.

Precise details of how he came to rest there in the Canadian cemetery are still unknown to me.

Research so far

Much of what I have learned thus far is general information gleaned from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and Internet sources, including the best account so far from the website of the Montormel Memorial. There is also a book that looks promising.

If I manage to find more accurate information, I’ll add it to this article.

When Charlemagne died in early 814, he left behind him the strongest empire known to Western Europe since that of the Romans. Barely a generation later, it had been dissolved.

The wholesale division of territories among the royal issue led to weakness and fragmentation. In the case of the Carolingian empire, the sum of the whole had been greater than the parts.

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Dutch Limburg

Part of a day trip that included the medieval town of Valkenburg and Maastricht, the birthplace of the European Union.

Nevertheless, this carving up of land gave us a prototype of modern Europe. The transition from tribes to feudal kingdoms to nation states had begun.

Valkenberg

Where the plains of Flanders spread east towards the Rhine, the land rises in sudden bursts in a series of wooded valleys. As we saw in Geraardsbergen, hills in this part of the world are prized assets. In Valkenburg, the ruined castle sits atop one such steep incline above the houses, cafes and shops.

With a long and painful history of sieges, the latest of which is being mounted by determined tourists, the town has settled into a quieter pace of life after centuries as a major city of Dutch Limburg.

Maastricht

This fine city, cleaved by the great river Maas (to francophone Belgians, it’s the Meuse), was no easier to navigate in the car despite the fact that J passed through here on her Grand Tour in 1996.

No matter, for we eventually managed to park and headed into the streets on a hot summer’s afternoon. In the Vrijthof, there appeared to be a boules tournament in progress. We later learned that this is a major international event, as far as the game of boules goes, anyway.

As we paced around, J’s memory occasionally sputtered into life like a knackered engine. She would remember the minutest detail while the general topography mysteriously eluded her.

We lunched at Brasserie Britannique, not because we were missing Britain, but because I had spied a rather natty looking croque madame and, less importantly, it brought back memories of the UK’s rather naff diplomacy in ’92.

For no Briton over the age of, say, 20 (except perhaps J with her memory being what it is) will hear the name Maastricht without remembering something about the Treaty of the European Union signed there, whose rubric included the foundation of the Euro.

That was also the beginning of a slow, ugly decline for the Conservative Party, the resuscitation of which may be complete in 2009 when Britain will vote to rid itself of the cretinous Gordon Brown and cronies.

Aachen

It may be somewhat unfair to suggest that, apart from its marvellous Carolingian heritage site, there isn’t much else going for Aachen, or Aix-La-Chapelle as it has also sometimes been known. That’s just how it seemed to J and I as we arrived from Maastricht during the late afternoon.

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Aachen

Once the seat of Charlemagne's empire, Germany's westernmost city still boasts his stunning cathedral his rather more modest throne.

Charlemagne liked the hot springs so much that he stayed and ruled his empire from here every winter from 768, living late into his 60s. It is strangely edifying to imagine perhaps the greatest leader of the Middle Ages gingerly dipping his toes into the 70-plus degree waters.

Subsequent kings of the Holy Roman Empire were crowned in Aachen throughout the course of the next half-millennium at the world-famous cathedral he founded, about which more in a moment.

Indeed, the city’s history is long, distinguished and notably cosmopolitan. It sits on Germany’s border with Belgium and the Netherlands. In modern times, it is twinned with two other heavyweight cathedral cities, Toledo and Reims. More dubiously, it is also twinned with Halifax, West Yorkshire.

Aachen Cathedral

The great kaiserdom was one of the earliest, and one would expect one of the more easily acknowledged, proposals for UNESCO World Heritage status. Stepping inside, we began our fourth visit to a UNESCO site this year.

Built in 792, this is the oldest cathedral in Northern Europe. With a richly diverse mix of architectural styles and decoration, it is certainly one of the most beautiful.

The beautiful interior dazzles visitors, in contrast to the simple, rather sober, marble throne on which Charlemagne sat in one of the upper galleries.

The lofty, domed Palatine Chapel dominates the overall plan. The chapel was Charlemagne’s own chapel and it appears to have been modelled to some extent on the basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, a building the well-travelled King probably knew well.

• Director: Paul Verhoeven
• Netherlands, 1977
• 

Verhoeven’s revisionist wartime drama is a bittersweet story of five student dandies who each face the subjugation of their country in different ways. The film displays a sensitivity that’s missing in the director’s Hollywood oeuvre.

Soldier of Orange would still be an effective ensemble piece without the outstanding performances put in by Rutger Hauer and Jeroen Krabbé, oscillating unnervingly between humour and horror.

Verhoeven’s visual interpretation of Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema’s book was also informed by personal experience, and he may draw on this resource once more in the forthcoming Black Book, his first Dutch film for 21 years.