Travels with Claud

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Day 7

20160823

Groningen



A quite day today, after konking out at 8.30pm last night, and sleeping until 7am! All the bike riding is catching up with me. I must have about 400km (250 miles) in my legs now, which, with a couple rest days says I’m cycling on average 50 miles a day, not a huge amount really. It’s a life of sorts.

After my 45 minute run this morning, in anticipation of the Chippenham Half week after next, I walked into Groningen, pronounced GroNINGen. A bit like pronouncing Chippenham, ChiPPENham. Unless you at least try and say it properly people don’t know what you’re talking about. I bought my train tickets (me + bike) and was given yellow & blue tickets; yesterday they were red & white.

Being hugely smart I quickly realised that the yellow & blue tickets are for the yellow & blue inter-city trains, and the the red & white tickets are for the local sprinter trains! What a brilliantly simple system. The yellow & blue timetable also told me that inter-city trains to Rotterdam, via my stop Zwolle, are every hour, on minute 16, and always from platform 4b. The bike carriages are always in the engine unit. I had a quick look at one while I was there and it was full. Better get there early.

GroNINGen is the principal municipality for the whole of Friesland so it has the major university for the province, the teaching hospital, and the major museums of the area. I had a wander around and it’s pleasant enough. It’s nowhere near as clinically clean as Leiden or Alkmaar. It doesn’t have that feeling of ageing wealth seeping out of the doors and windows. I’d say it’s a lot more of a young hippy town, noticeable by the houseboats on the canals that are mostly ramshackle and weatherworn. Naturally enough there are more young people here than I’ve seen anywhere else that I’ve been so far in Holland, but then this is by far the biggest place I’ve been so far!

After a cafe stop for an hour, to read about tomorrow’s destination, Arnhem, I went to the GroNINGer Museum, GroNINGen’s major tourist attraction it seems. There are few permanent exhibitions and when I visited I was lucky enough to be able to see the ‘New Wild Paintings’ of the German Neo-Expressionist movement of the 1980’s (Punk for short), and the fragile temporary structures of a sculpture. Now, as you probably know I’m not an art historian, and it’s possibly a cheap uneducated shot (happy to argue about it though), but have you ever seen the 1960’s Tony Hancock film,The Artist. I love it.

Hancock moves to Paris to live the bohemian attic existence of the great misunderstood artistic genius. Unfortunately his childish daubs are the product of an untrained, talentless, middle-aged bloke from the leafy suburbs. Initially the young counter culture proclaims his work as liberating; breaking free of the shackles of class, patronism and intellectualism. However, they soon realise that Hancock is a pompous indolent idiot, and that his paintings are trite and without content, merit, talent or meaning.

Segue-way back to the ‘Punk’ Exhibition. I have added six photos from the Museum for you to look at. Five are from the Neo-Expressionist movement and Fragile Sculptures. One is by Andy Warhol. Your challenge is to identify the Warhol. There’s no prize, just your own sense of recognising real talent from the hyperbole of art history.

I had this stupid idea that I could save €10 by washing my own socks, but they’re not drying; so now I have to spend the next hour in the bathroom with ten pairs of socks and a hair dryer.

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