Tag Archives: Travel

Theo Jansen – Strandbeesten

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If you repeat the word ‘wind’ often enough it will start blowing. (Theo Jansen)


I took this photo three years ago when one of the Strandbeesten was on display at Lange Voorhout, one of the oldest streets in the Hague. You can see the linden trees (Tilia) which were planted in the early 16th century.


https://www.strandbeest.com/


On his website, Theo Jansen explains how the Strandbeesten came to be. In short videos he describes the development of the neural system, leg system and waterfeeler system – essential for survival on the beach.


The main component is cheap yellow PVC tubing (around 2,000 to 3,000 metres per animal) with tie clips and empty PET bottles. An animal weighs around 180 kg. Jansen would prefer to use bamboo (more ecological) but this would not survive on the beach.


A diagram shows the evolution and family tree since the ‘Pregluton’ phase of 1989. In the winter Jansen works on developing the next generation which is tested on the beach the following summer. That species of Strandbeest is then declared extinct.

Source: This is The Hague 2026


People pay to be on Scheveningen beach (north of the pier) when Jansen tests the new animal, and the 2026 sessions filled quickly. Here are some videos instead:

Imagine 5 Gallery – Fantastic beasts brought to life by the wind


Jansen gives a brief explanation as a number of Strandbeesten are about to be exhibited in the Kunstmusuem (2022).

32 Celsius – writing prompt

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Only half an hour’s drive away is Katwijk aan Zee, a traditional town with a small fishing port. During the summer vacation, the weekly Tuesday market is extended: crafts people showing and selling their goods, music, or a display of vintage cars.

The council spent money on a large car park hidden below the dunes. Coffee, a walk round the market, lunch on the beach. This year my friend and I chose the Trio of the Sea – smoked salmon, Dutch shrimps and a delicious taco with tuna and wasabi. We favour Het Strand, with glass panels between tables for privacy.

Today, the heat is back. So, I’m posting a cooling prompt from earlier this year. Write on from Everything was frozen…

Everything is frozen

The welcomes clatter to the ground.
Those sandwiches, salmon and cucumber;
the cheese scones; even the tiered metal tray
on the once-wooden table. Mary, the absentee
landlady, gasps. Two small vowels fall on the carpet.
Everything so white, so silvery, so creaking on the change.

Tom strokes his beard, that has been soft as a lamb,
cuts his finger and now the miracle of the red blood
turning to icy droplets. If there had been a cat,
it would have chased them around the room.
This is always a sadness – a poem or story without a cat.

The Journal of Imaginary Research

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Once, a long time ago, I was an academic psychologist. The Journal of Imaginary Research publishes short works of fiction in the academic genre of the Research Abstract. A poet friend and academic mentioned the journal to me last year.

I was chuffed the editors accepted my piece of imaginary research for issue 11 (2026) which has ‘Shrinkage’ as its theme. There are 58 fascinating abstracts from a range of disciplines. The issue is free to download here.


I also had great fun composing the biography. My alter ego is Dr Melody Rowe.

The impact of childhood belief on adult ability to shrink objects

Photo credit Shutterstock 119440741

Abstract

The Netherlands is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Its inhabitants are taking up more space (obesity). Tiny houses are becoming more popular. It might be beneficial if other objects could be shrunk too (Bottema, 2020).

Most Dutch adults have experienced seeing white horses during December: St Nikolaas uses a white horse for transport. His horse needs to reduce in size rapidly to descend chimneys and leave presents by the fireplace.

It was hypothesized that adults who lost their belief in St Nikolaas at an early age would either be unable to shrink their hobby horse, or take significantly longer to do so, compared with those who held on to their belief longer. Parameters for ‘early’ and ‘late’ loss were established across gender and age. Participants were allocated to groups accordingly. They were presented with a sequence of visual stimuli (images of white horses in different settings) and then instructed to shrink their hobby horse until it fitted within the confidence interval. In countries where Father Christmas and reindeer are significant seasonal characters, the principle of generalization predicts similar results.

Biography

Dr Melody Rowe is a very cross cultural psychologist with a PhD in the luminosity of liminal and ‘thin’ places. They are the Niobe Professor at the University of Tuonela where they continue to conduct ground-breaking research in the oral transmission of swan songs and the impact of trans-generational inheritance of boundary markers. They are Visiting Professor at the University of the Styx where they oversee post-doctoral research. They have published widely in their chosen field and are the author of the best-selling guide Love or leave a liminal place (Nemo T Press, 2016) which was translated into 14 languages.

Birthday Party – poem

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Today is the birthday of my friend Kathleen Kummer. After several falls, she is now very frail and housebound.

Kathleen and I met on a writing week with the poet Lawrence Sail at the beginning of the century. She had lived and worked in the Netherlands. We became friends. I visited her in Dorchester and in Devon where she moved, aged 79, to be nearer her two daughters.

Kathleen had a body of work when she moved to Devon, and sent a manuscript to Alwyn Marriage at Oversteps Books. They published her debut collection Living below sea level (2012).

I am deeply grateful to Kathleen for our friendship and our poetry connection. Today I’m posting her poem Birthday Party, showing her empathy and eye for telling detail.

Birthday Party

It’s his fortieth birthday. He’s sitting alone. He seems
neither man, not child, nor anything in between.
When he opens his presents, he’s all of these at once,
and happy. (‘What shall I give him?’ ‘Anything’, they’d said.)

Somehow, he’d made it plain he wanted a fish
on his cake. So on top, a flatfish. It looks like a fossil,
all its bones impressed on the green marzipan. A frieze
of stiff, blue icing ripples round the base.

A family group over there on the leather settee
talks about children at college and moving house.
He gazes through and beyond them, remote as those heads
on Easter Island, but jumps up to blow out his candles.

He’s given a card which reads Happy 30th! (‘He won’t know,
don’t worry.’) His hair is receding – he’s beginning to look like
his father, who tomorrow will take him back to the Home
where he has his bedroom and bathroom en suite. (‘Very smart!’).

Sublime Lungs – guest poet

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It is a great pleasure introducing guest poet Kate Noakes. The four poems are from her new collection Sublime Lungs, published this month by Two Rivers Press.

Carrie Etter writes ‘With each successive poem, Sublime Lungs expands the scope of how this condition affects one’s experience of the world in poems by turns witty and moving.’

You can find Kate’s biography after the poems. On her website you can also find details of future launches in the UK. The online launch is 24 April.

At a lecture on the lungs

Saying they look like cauliflower
is troublesome. I don’t much like it.
Can’t you imagine some other vegetable
for me to care about?

Describing particulate-caused cell change
as columnar to cobblestone won’t do it either.
These are impossible to traverse in heels
and I’ve broken so many stilettos.

Nor does learning of mucus-producing cells,
on the increase and ready for infection,
given this conjures fat black slugs
smearing themselves around in my chest

and in the coastal redwood fog forests,
banana slugs are choking me.

Bronchospasm, barotrauma, embolism

Is it worth it to see anemones
flowering deep, and multi-coloured fish
which never appear to the snorkeler?

Shall I risk it for sea pens and being dyed
by an octopus shooting to her cave
in an ink cloud?

What chances with vicious
silver barracuda and the inevitable
circling sharks?

Enough of purple jelly blobs
faceting rock pools, or their pink selves
unfurled between the tides.

Masked and wet-suited
on the side of a boat
with an artificial lung

a tank of air that will take me, where?
Heaven or hell. Slowly,
cautiously, let me live to tell.

Kent marsh frogs

Oat gold grass, swathes of rush in purple-brown,
the Oare marshes stretch to the horizon.
Mercurial tides leave a slice of silver water
isolating us from the Isle of Sheppey.

Clouds are quickening and the late summer wind
seeds my eyes – a second wave.
Half-blind with redness, I almost miss
the brackish pond with the largest of frogs

– dinner plates are no exaggeration –
and as for the ring-necked grass snakes
waiting in the surface weeds, I watch their vigil
through hay-fever tears.

A snake lunges. And again. The frog
breathes on through skin or mouth or lungs.

Caunes-Minervois

Swifts squadron the sky from early light.
All day they gorge on the wing, resting
only for seconds on the cream-stone sills
of tight-packed village houses.

They catch their breath quick, quickly
under orange-lichened pantiles and are off.
It’s a wonder their small hearts, their lungs
can cope with such long sorties.

There’s never a hint of wheeze
in this warmth and my chest expands
when I can take in the heady scent
of star jasmine. It’s good

there are men in their potagers,
chivalrous enough to cut a stem of roses –
doubles, old-fashioned, and perfumed
to fill my breath with healing.

Biography


Kate Noakes lives in Bristol and has a PhD from the University of Reading. Her new book (her ninth full collection), Sublime Lungs, is published by Two Rivers Press in April 2026. Bog Queens, a pamphlet from Green Bottle Press, is going to be published in June this year.


 She was elected to the Welsh Academy in 2011. Her content rich website, Boomslang Poetry, is archived by the National Library of Wales. Kate’s first non-fiction title is Real Hay-on-Wye (2022, Seren).


During six years in Paris, she was founding president of Paris Lit Up. Kate acted as a trustee for London literature development agency, Spread the Word, between 2018 and 2022 and she is one third of Bristol poetry performance group, Braid. She programmes the poetry events for the Clifton Literature Festival.

For Easter, try egg blowing – guest poet

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Here is a sample poem by our April guest poet Kate Noakes. The poem is from her new collection Sublime Lungs, which will be published by Two Rivers Press on 21 April. This is her ninth full collection. More poems after Easter.

Kate will read at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival on 14 April. There is an online launch on 24 April. You can find the schedule of online and live launches on Kate’s website

Kate Noakes Breath of Fire

For Easter, try egg blowing

David Attenborough stood on an ostrich egg
to demonstrate its strength once.
‘The toughest egg in the world,’ he said.
He may even have jumped on it for emphasis.

Of course, no-one had drilled it and sapped its yolk
with mega-breaths and an extra-thick straw,
which is how it withstood his weight, unlike
the three souvenirs we bought in Oudtshorn,
their weakness apparent under failing coving.

They smithereened the carpet and needed
hand picking, the hoover’s inhalations proved weak.
We’d have been better off buying feather dusters
from the hawker pitched outside the super-market.
They’d have been easier to carry home.

Riddles – writing prompt

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Most of January I was on Lanzarote. I was unwell, so I spent much of my time reading in the Piano Bar of the hotel. Here is a view from the balcony. In the distance is Fuerteventura.

I also forgot about posting the answers to Vasko Popa’s riddles which I posted in December. The riddles are from his collection The Golden Apple, 2010. It’s a round of stories, songs, spells, proverbs & riddles that Popa himself selected from various anthologies of Serbo-Croatian folk literature. Here are the riddles and their answers, followed by another riddle.


Riddles

  1. In one room both bone and flesh grow.
  2. I stretched a gold thread through the wide world and wound it up into a walnut shell.
  3. I shake a tree here, but the fruit falls half an hour away

Answers


1 Egg
2 Eyesight
3 The sound of a bell

    Photo
Photo credit: stevepb via Pixabay

Riddle


With an iron key
I open a green fortress
And drive out the black cattle

Canada is as far away as bibles are – poetry

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I was very pleased to see my poem Canada is as far away as bibles are on After. Many thanks to Editor Mark Antony Owen. You can read the poem here.


After publishes ekphrastic poems and my poem was inspired by The Avid Reader, 1949. Rodney Graham (1949 – 2022) was a visual artist, painter, and musician. He made the lightbox in 2011.


‘We see the middle-aged man / carrying a hat, smoking a pipe, / because Graham inhabits him.’


The Avid Reader, 1949 was one of the works on display at Voorlinden Museum, Wassenaar, the Netherlands in the major exhibition of Graham’s work titled That’s Not Me. An ironic title as Graham appears in all the works – as a builder having a smoke, a lighthouse keeper, historical figure.

Voorlinden is a fabulous museum – more about it some other time.


I was struck by the attention to detail and the scale of the works. The woman is ‘his wife, swing coat, high heels, walks past on the right.’

wetting the ink…guest poet

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It’s a great pleasure to introduce this month’s guest poet Julie Mellor.

Julie holds a PhD in creative writing from Sheffield Hallam University and has published two poetry chapbooks with Smith/Doorstop: Breathing Through Our Bones (2012) and Out of the Weather (2017). In 2019 she became interested in haiku, and since then her haiku and haibun have appeared in Blithe Spirit, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Presence, The Heron’s Nest and Tinywords, as well as two Red Moon anthologies. She recently retired from a career in education, and enjoys walking her dog, attending art classes and playing the banjo.

Here are recent haiku and a haibun with their publication details. You can find more of Julie’s writing on her site here.

Modern Haiku 54.3 (Autumn 2023)

toe-hold weeds
things that were said
years ago

Blithe Spirit 35:2 (May 2025)

long night joining the dots between stars

The Heron’s Nest Summer 2025

wetting the ink
a ghost orchid blooms
from its painted stem

Presence issue 82 (Summer 2025)

morning moon
beside the fretless banjo
pistachio shells

BHS Hope anthology 2025 (ed Neil Sommerville)

butterfly summer
I write a letter
to my future self

Presence 73 – Summer 2022 – and included in Contemporary Haibun 18 (Red Moon Press, 2023)

The Coffin Path

Grass, waist high this morning, and wet with last night’s rain. Brushing past it, my jeans wick the droplets from seeding cock’s-foot and brome. No one else walks this way. Behind the hawthorn hedge is the cemetery. People tend to use the other path, the one that the council mows. Or else they drive – ‘to save their legs’ my mother says. Some days she says she wants to be buried. Other days, she thinks she’d prefer to be cremated and have her ashes scattered next to a memorial bench. No rush to decide, I tell her, trying to make light of things.

elderflowers
pressed in her prayer book
a recipe for wine

Solstice and poetry – books

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Solstice: a clear day here in the Netherlands with the sun breaking through as I type this.


My holiday reading is sorted. The seven books include translations from French, Spanish and Norwegian. The latter an interesting set of haiku and haiku-like poems about the Japanese ski-jumper Noriaki Kasai.


Broken Sleep Books use the world’s largest on-demand publishers. The parcel came from France: no import duties, no VAT, no waiting while parcels linger in the customs depot. A bonus!


This is my last post for 2025. Season’s Greetings and many thanks to you all.


Here is the link to James Schuyler’s poem Linen. A poem about gratitude, starting with a question, and almost a sestude.