See no evil / Television follows an outtake of Nowadays a Woman’s Got To Hit a Man / Captain Beefheart turned up loud at 5.30. Outside the tent door, spilt macaroni cheese, scooped that up. I was hungry last night, barely able to stand after ten hours and six hundred miles from Hook of Holland, this included a solid hours u turns amid terraformed wilderness of the obedient rows of Dutch homes. I was about twenty miles north of Hamburg in a non nondescript camp site near a non nondescript town.

That morning, the girl goddesses floated by on bicycles with their identical hair cuts to beautiful length like the tidy gardens and hedges. “Relaxed or stoned?” the coffee shop girl asks… “er, relaxed please…” The same familiar street I return to each time in Amsterdam with its coffee shops, occasional guilty students in the back, so many replaced by anodyne side salad/white wine bars, businesswomen outside ignoring the passers by.
I drink my second coffee and tuck the bubble gum and papers into a pocket of my tank bag, kicking my arthritic hip over the gap in the saddle between the tank and my luggage and follow the tramlines out up onto the E1 heading north. I undo the zips in my forearms and armpits open as I follow the traffic… the vents in my helmet are open, it’s getting hot now. I leave the fifty or so English scooterists behind at eight thirty, scattered outside breakfast stalls near the boat. They were dressed in clothes that would soak up the tiniest shower of rain. Many them wearing green Harrington bomber jackets, their backs covered with an even arrangement of four inch square patches, each denoting a run they had been on. They faced each other chattering like children on a school trip.
I don’t know when I can upload this; there is no WiFi here. There are cuckoos in the oak tree above me, waking me at 4:30. I watched Shutter Island last night on my tablet, falling asleep while worrying about being actually mad and not realising it, like Leonardo de Caprio in the film. An excellent film I missed when it was released.
A word about German car drivers. Fast. 140 mph fast, I ended the afternoon at over a hundred, lorries spinning backward. The bike never better, after a few hours it was like flying, urged on by the superb German 102 octane fuel. The Metzlers are nicely worn in now – alas, I have to pack again and push on into Denmark.