Found Objects

A fencing meet practically next door —12 minutes by train— so we could leave late and had most of the morning for housework and last-minute weekend shopping. At the entrance to the sports hall, one of the judges greeted us and asked “did it go all right by public transport?” I’m used to people at fencing meets thinking that getting there by public transport is by definition difficult and unpleasant and we’re heroic for suffering it, so I said, “why, yes, of course” without telling him about the roundabout bus route that the public-transport planner had made us take: bus 2 that goes all through the newish housing estate, when we could have taken bus 4 that goes straight, and a driver who told us that the stop I thought was our stop wasn’t, and later asked why we hadn’t got off there. (In fact going places by public transport is usually pleasant, though time-consuming, and easy once you’ve got the hang of it. I suppose it’s mostly a matter of competence, though; I can imagine people not used to it getting completely confused.) It wasn’t until later that I realised that he thought we came from Gouda, because that was the place where he’d first met us, and Gouda is on the other side of the country and happened to be completely isolated because of railway works and an accident.

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This time we knew where to go in Wageningen and didn’t have to stand on the crossing with four signs pointing in different directions, each one to another sports centre. And we found out, completely by accident, that the bus the public transport planner recommended from Ede-Wageningen station isn’t the most convenient one; the most convenient one is the one we took from Arnhem which goes all the way from one railway station to another, stopping three minutes’ walk from the sports hall.

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The kid’s been fencing in Almere twice before, but I’d never noticed the extremely weird art on the walkways that connect the sports cafe to the bleachers.

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The first time we had a fencing meet in Ermelo it was in a very new, very large sports hall in a new (and, by the look of it, rich) neighbourhood. This time it was in the old sports hall on the industrial estate. Easy walking distance from the station and easy to find, and nostalgic for me because I used to go to the swimming pool in the same building when I was living in the next village over as a teenager. But it’s small. There were about the average number of people, but they only just fit in.

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This one was on Sunday, when we usually can’t make it, but it was in De Scheg (I’ll spare you the “click here” front page, but the little map marked PANOVIEW on the index page leads to a nice geek toy) so we rushed over after church, twenty minutes by bike. It was strange to use the sports hall where I sit every Saturday morning reading, or abusing manuscript with fluorescent markers, while the twins swim. Well, I don’t actually sit in the sports hall itself, but in the entrance hall where smoke wafts in every time the door opens because they forgot to have a designated smoking area far from the sliding doors.

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The first meet of the Points Tournament in 2005 was in ‘t Harde, a little town that used to be one of the big garrison towns of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces when we still had conscription. We have a professional army now (it’s a normal job that people actually choose to do, you’re not thrown into it if you happen to be male, healthy and in your late teens) and that means there’s much less of it.

Even a flourishing army brings its own particular brand of desolation, and this was already evident on the station.

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The last instalment of the 2004 youth tournament. The kid missed two in a row, first because we were in Paris which is rather too far from Apeldoorn, then because it was November 21, the Presentation of the Mother of God, too much of a Sunday for either me or Boudewijn to miss church on.

I promised her the last meet even though it was on a Sunday, so we set off, with one cold, one book (mine wasn’t long enough, it ran out on the way home and I had to borrow The Princess Diaries from the kid) and two mandarin oranges each, to Almere where it also started.

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The instructions from 9292ov.nl, the public transport journey planner, were clear enough (though we almost took the wrong train in Utrecht anyway; after all, the Intercity to Rotterdam used to stop in Gouda). The bus driver knew where the sports hall was, “right across that bridge”. And sure enough, there it was. Striped black and white, hence its name.

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But we almost got stranded at Olst.

We were half an hour later than we’d planned, meaning that we only had to wait slightly over an hour for a train to take us to Zwolle; someone working on a fuse-box ten miles further on had accidentally cut a cord.

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The kid had another fencing match, in Ermelo this time, quite close to Grandpa (who we visited afterwards). The first was in Almere. The second time, in our own town at that, she got ill on the Saturday and the match was on the Sunday, so she missed it. This was the third time. And she made up for missing the second: won seven out of her eight bouts.

And I took the best fencing picture in my life, at least my life until now; this is a cut from it, fit to advertise junior fencing. Mine is the one with the red pigtail. The other one is the boy who came to the match thinking that girls were no good, and was beaten 5 to 2 in the very first bout by my daughter. He was apparently so impressed that he promptly let the little seven-year-old girl in the set beat him as well.

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I’d never have thought to have business in Almere, but that’s where the first fencing match in the youth tournament was. Naomi was in it, two days before her tenth birthday.

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