Just after nine in the morning, nasty slushy weather, around freezing. As I come out of the supermarket with a box of groceries and am about to put it in my bike bag a small woman wheeling a shiny blue bike speaks to me.

Small woman: Excuse me, do you know whether the bike lanes are clear?

Me: Well, I used the main lane, I didn’t dare risk the bike lanes.

Small woman: What about the thoroughfares? Did they salt them?

Me: I’m sure they salted [road A] because that’s the way I came, but not the bike lanes. (In fact, an hour and a half earlier, when I had almost reached the swimming pool, I was overtaken by a huffing and grunting municipal snow-plough which not only swept and salted the main lane of the road but also threw any snow that was in its way on to the bike lane; no wonder it was impenetrable. But I didn’t tell the small woman that, because she clearly didn’t listen.)

Small woman: What about [road B]?

Me: I only saw the first part of that at the roundabout, but it was clear all right.

Small woman: As far as [apartment complex about a mile up that road]?

Me: I don’t know, I didn’t pass that way, I turned right at the roundabout. But the part I could see looked completely clear to me.

Small woman: You didn’t pass that way?

Me: No, I didn’t go everywhere!

Small woman: (genuinely surprised, it seems) You didn’t? (thinks) I was thinking of taking the bus instead.

Me: Yes, that’s a good idea, take the bus by all means!

Small woman: Oh, thank you, thank you!

While in the shower —this kind of thing always happens in the shower— it suddenly occurred to me that the next major station on the railway line in each of the four directions that trains can go from this town starts either with A or with Z. For people with a railway map of the Netherlands and some diligence, this fact alone is probably enough to figure out which town we live in, but as that’s not a secret and easy enough to find out by other means anyway, I don’t mind.

And when I thought some more about it, I realised that both stations on the east-west line start with A, and both stations on the north-south line with Z.

The smaller stations that not all trains stop at (and some of which are too new to be on the map I linked to) blur this elegance with letters like T, R and H, but that’s not to be helped.

Remember the silly traffic light? I passed it again, found it useless and confusing again, and decided to at least try to do something about it.

Saturday I asked our friendly neighbour the town councillor who to turn to, and got a name. Yesterday I sent mail to that person: “Dear Mr Traffic Man, Councillor X recommended you; here’s a photo, this is the situation; would it be a good idea to put up a sign allowing cyclists to turn right at the red light, as everybody is doing it already anyway?” This morning when I came back from swimming there was a message from the traffic coordinator (who Traffic Man had sent my mail to), saying “You’re completely right. I’ll order a sign and have it put up.”

Next time someone says in my hearing that people in the town offices don’t listen to the public, I’ll have a story to tell.

St Nicholas falls on a Sunday this year, and to give people the chance to celebrate the saint’s day’s eve (with presents — that’s where Santa Claus comes from, but the Dutch usually celebrate it on the actual day instead of moving it to Christmas) we had only Vespers instead of a whole vigil, and at four in the afternoon instead of in the evening. It seems to have worked.

Congregation: 13 adults, 3 teenagers (counting the eleven-year-old who stands with Secunda and Tertia these days), 4 smaller kids.
Crew: Altar: Fr T on his own. Choir: 5 women, with Fr T filling in as bass whenever he had nothing else to do.
Coordination: Excellent, though at one point it was useful that the choir tends to follow me, because I think I was the only person who sang the right thing (the sticheron melody of the first tone; all the others tried to sing it as a troparion)
Voice: Apart from an intermittent burr because a cold wants to seize me (but doesn’t get much purchase) okay.
Strangeness: It suddenly occurred to me that saying “in the same tone” signals that what follows is something different.

Well done in view of current affairs, that floating mosque. You might have weighted it better, though, because every new person inside made it list and lurch like a row-boat. We (I don’t remember who else apart from me, but a good handful of people) didn’t want to enter at first, but the imam (or whoever, with a long robe and a longish beard) did a very good job convincing us that we were welcome. Strangely, we had to stand with our backs to the action; I thought at the time that it was because we weren’t Muslims, but perhaps it was just that the action was at the back of the room. There was singing, which we had a textbook for: doggerel in short lines, which I don’t remember as being particularly religious, without any mention of God or Allah. All the same it was so Protestant in flavour that I half expected a Gospel reading to follow, but we got a tour of the building vessel instead (making it lurch again), a talk with the imam, and another song on the quay, with longer lines this time but just as much doggerel.

(I realise now that the details were probably so fuzzy, and presumably completely wrong, because I’ve never been in an actual mosque let alone to the service.)

The bike ride after that would have been uneventful if it hadn’t been for the steep and winding roads and the darts and cannonballs flying at us at every turn; probably from playing too much Bloons Tower Defense 3 last night.