Sewage farms and miniaturisation
How to recognise when life gives you a gift to write about
Sometimes as a writer the process of putting words down on paper is akin to slamming your head repeatedly against a keyboard until something useful dribbles out. On other occasions the words are served up as though at a Roman banquet, accompanied by dancing girls and pipe music.
This last Tuesday was an example of the latter. It was the final day of my research trip to the Netherlands for ‘Orange Sky, Rising Water’ and the video/podcast series that I’m making to accompany it. I was doing the 10th and final walk of the ‘10 walks that explain the Netherlands’, which I’d blandly labeled as ‘Den Haag’ in my head. As the final walk I wanted it to be a kind of grand recap, but also focus on the issue of inequality.
A news item a few weeks back identified Konijnenlaan in Wassenaar as the street with the highest house prices in the Netherlands (€3.1 million, if you’re interested). Great - that was very obviously the start of the walk, which would then head up through lovely old Wassenaar to the dunes where we used to walk as a family, to the beach and south towards Scheveningen and Den Haag. And then I realised where I needed to go.
Madurodam is about as wholesome a day out for the family as it’s possible to get, and it sat in exactly the right place to end this tenth walk. It’s a superb miniaturised version of this entire remarkable country, from the cathedral at Den Bosch to the Binnenhof in Den Haag, plus all points in between. Imagine a high definition physical rendering of the 3D satellite version of Google Maps. It’s terrifically well done, and a perfect place for me to sum up what I’d learned and seen in the course of the book/videos/podcasts. But what made it even more perfect was its extreme Dutchness…
I can imagine what an Italian version would be like: Venice’s Grand Canal, the Trevi Fountain and Colosseum, Florence’s Duomo. The list writes itself. Britain’s might include a model of the set from the TV soap opera Coronation Street. China’s would include Shanghai’s mighty skyline. The Dutch version at Madurodam included…
… a sewage treatment plant.
Nothing sums up the brilliance of the Dutch as much as this little, passed over corner of the miniaturised Netherlands. There are also bits of 1960s housing estates, industrial facilities, flood defences and infrastructure. This is brilliant.
You see the Dutch have made their country with their own hands. First they had to wrest it from the waves and the marshes. Then they had to design it, putting this here and that there. There is little organic growth, such as you would see in Italy or elsewhere. It all gives the impression of having been sensibly designed by tall men in dark suits. It is a place where road signs make sense, where traffic does what it should logically do, where housing knits together with playgrounds and transport, with light industrial estates and productively optimised agriculture. There is function, and you get the feeling that they never forget what makes a country a country for real people to live real lives in, rather than a set of postcard views.
The Netherlands is a human-designed country, and has been for hundreds of years. That is why it is so fascinating to walk around, to examine, to prod, and to write about. (The same is true on a smaller scale for Singapore, which I also wrote a book about.)
And that is why, when I saw the tiny, functioning model of a sewage treatment plant at Madurodam, I recognised a gift when I saw it. Now to finish that first draft of the book.