It is more than 25 years since my first trip to the Netherlands. On that last minute EasyJet flight to meet the guy I had snogged in a Fulham bar a fortnight before, I was full of stereotypes about Holland. No hills, good at football and over-flowing with drugs and red lights. My flatmate had warned me that going anywhere near Amsterdam would result in me ending up on the “Red Hot and Dutch” TV channel which had just been released in the UK. I am pleased to report that I did not. Instead, I found myself in the charming city of Leiden, immediately falling in love with it and the man I would eventually marry.
Now I know Leiden and the surrounding area better than my husband does. I like to regale him with tales of what I see on my cycling and jogging tours. Occasionally I manage to drag him out to see the new places I find and it is with not inconsiderable skill that he conceals his unbounded joy at being introduced to these new vistas. Anyone other than me would think he was not remotely impressed.
Recently, we took a day out to Palais Het Loo. “Loo” in Dutch is pronounced “low”, should you wish to move your imagination away from WCs, although, before moving on from that subject, I will note that the public conveniences at Palais Het Loo are plentiful, clean and well-designed. This palace is more accurately described as a retreat or hunting lodge and was built in 1684 by King William III and Queen Mary II (England’s first and only joint sovereigns). It is a very solid, modern-looking edifice, possibly thanks to it having been fiddled with quite a lot over the years, before being put back, as faithfully as possible, to how it would have looked in William and Mary’s day (ignoring the en-suite bathrooms and the 5000sqm underground visitor centre). In short, it looks like it was built yesterday, because a lot of it probably was. It was given to the Dutch state by the House of Orange in 1962 – a cunning way to avoid what must be a constant need for dusting.
My husband and I are very good at looking at the outside of buildings on our travels, but we are rarely tempted by what is inside. I am fascinated by the facades of grand dwellings and pondering the thought processes which took the designer and builder from a simple shelter-for-two to a multi-storey, many-roomed structure, covered in stuccowork cherubs and gilded bunches of grapes. With my Kevin-McCloud-from-Grand-Designs hat on, I query how anyone was able to build the amazing castles of Europe, not only from a financial and practical perspective, but also how on earth did they dream up these places?
My low-brow nature and dangerously short attention span, means that the museums, artwork and treasures which sit on the other side of the fancy walls hold little interest for me. In addition, the bone-achingly slow pace at which it is considered polite to walk through a museum or stately home fills me with proper dread. Valentine has a brow far higher than mine and probably would have had his head turned by the lure of a museum’s innards by now, were it not for his choice of wife. Long ago, I established that he could be distracted by the cafes of historic places and thus I can avoid the tedium of traipsing around the inside of them.
However, every year we buy a Museumkaart, which grants members free access to loads of museums, galleries and heritage all over NL, so we were able to go to the Palace for free and, as the tea rooms were inside the grounds, I agreed to venture into the building.
Oddly, the first thing we had to do on entering was to surrender our coats. I am mostly cold (my younger brother would argue, in every sense) and I cannot pretend that I was happy about this, not least because the enormously impressive and seemingly brand-new white marble basement in which the cloakroom was situated was pretty nippy. Luckily, it was a teeny bit warmer upstairs, mainly thanks to the climbing of said stairs. Strangely, despite the 17th century royal family presumably not having to concern itself too much with the cost per-square foot of the land upon which the palace was built, they still went in for some ridiculously steep staircases. It was not, however, temperate on the roof terrace to which arrows woven, yes, woven into the carpets (literally no expense was spared in this place) led us. Talking of the extravagant carpets, they were so made-to-measure and bespoke that in places they faded from plain colours (for example, on a landing) to highly decorative patterns on a staircase. They have carpets which run through the public walkways of several rooms which perfectly match the carpets which cover the private areas of those rooms (if my description makes any sense to you) and carpets which looked exactly like the hard wood floors lying beneath them.
As we entered the staterooms, I got the impression that the purpose of taking our coats was to prevent us from yanking one or two of the thousands of excessively intricate tassels from the curtains in each room and secreting them in our coat pockets. I was tempted to cram a few handfuls of them into my handbag just to make the point that the hoi palloi are just as capable of thieving out of their coats as they are in them. Each tassel would make a pendant which would be too glitzy for most and yet someone thought that lots of them packed tightly together along the fringe of a pair of curtains made for tasteful adornment. I hasten to add, I would never steal anything from anywhere.
I was exceptionally grateful that the part of the palace open to the public was manageable in size and could be walked through at a reasonable clip. There was also plenty to cause wonder. We were particularly surprised by two rooms jam-packed with stuffed animals and skulls. There were your standard antler table lamps and deer heads on plaques which could be explained away by saying they were the by-products of a few venison suppers and/or an ecologically sound cull. Perhaps the enormous bear rug could be excused by saying it was the fatal result of an act of self-defence in a remote region. The same could possibly (at a stretch, given its diminutive size) be argued for the stuffed baby crocodile poof: “I had to kill it before it bit my ankle, guv’nor, and then it seemed wasteful not to create a foot rest out of it...”. Harder to justify was the umbrella stand fashioned from a huge elephant foot and the elephant's trunk above it holding aloft a rather cheap-looking lampshade. I assume the elephant did not give up its extremities voluntarily. A large dresser stood next to these. It was elaborately inlaid with a few more bits of the elephant, this time its ivory tusks. It would also be difficult to argue the necessity of killing the leopard which was laid out under a desk as a smaller rug. A leopard, I would guess, would be quite tricky to shoot accidentally, given its renowned elusiveness and the fact that it would have, almost certainly, been running away quickly from the men wielding firearms. I am also pretty sure big cats do not make pleasant meals.
But, of course, I am imposing my modern values on earlier times, when plundering the fauna of Africa seems to have been socially acceptable amongst the ruling classes. Perhaps the most important take-away from these rooms (other than the curtain tassels of course) is that animal parts look far better as parts of live animals. With this in mind, please check out my paintings of animals.