Marathon walk from Oostzaan to Noordwijk, Saturday 19 April 2025

Actual walking time 7h 25m, total elapsed time 8h 29m (last year: 6h 44m and 7h 44m respectively. Various reasons for being slower this year. For one, I haven’t been taking a regular daily/lunchtime walk for the last month or two, so I’m not in practice. (The lack of a daily walk is a habit I want to address.) The second (big) factor is because I was listening to podcasts rather than music for this walk. (I had saved up some episodes of 99% Invisible and Imaginary Worlds.) Walking to the beat is very good for maintaining pace. Walking to podcasts isn’t.

These two things are connected. I”m not under a lot of external stress at work, but I’m still new in the job and I want to do well. I’ve been doing silly things like skipping lunchtime walks and not maintaining good sleep hygiene. This last week was particularly bad, as I was trying to round off a piece of work that was taking me longer than I felt it should. I was feeling fatigued, and I wasn’t looking forward to doing a marathon walk. I’ve started treating it as an annual tradition, but I’m always wary of traditions turning into obligations. I mentioned to Abi that this year it was feeling much more like Type 2 fun rather than Type 1 fun. As a result, I decided to walk with some podcasts for enjoyment myself while I was doing something else less fun (walking).

As it turned out, the walk started off pleasant, and turned very nice. The weather was cool (6-14°C) but sunny. I left the house at 06:49 as the sky was still waking up. I walked through Poelenburg and over the Den Uylbrug towards the Noordzeekanaal. Google Maps’ walking directions were not helpful after that point. There is temporary floating housing for asylum seekers on the Gerrit Bolkade just before it curves round to the Noordzeekanaal, and the path next to the road is closed to cyclists and pedestrians, so I had to take a detour. Further along the canal, the directions had me walking along the grassy verge of the Westzanerweg, crossing the Nauernasebrug (not suitable for pedestrians), and then choosing between the grassy verge or the grassy dyke along the Nauernaseweg. I should know better. I’ve walked to that ferry before, and on bike or on foot it’s much better to take the slightly longer detour north up to Nauerna. By the time I got to the ferry, my feet were wet from walking in the dewy vegetation, and I was feeling a bit grumpy as a result.

I terms of shoes, in previous years I’ve tended to buy a new pair of walking shoes and to break them in before a long walk. This year I stuck with the Asics Gel-Pulse 15 I bought last year. These shoes have lasted a lot better than my previous Asics shoes. I like them because they’re lightweight and breathable, but the mesh upper seems to have a particular failure mode near the little toe. My last several pairs have all started to develop a tear before they were a year old. Maybe Asics have changed the material or design a bit, but this year: no tear. (I don’t think it’s that I’ve used them less. I did a lot of walking while I was off work last summer and autumn.)

Failure mode on a pair of Asics Gel-Pulse 13: through in the upper near the little toe

After crossing the Noordzeekanaal I continued on somewhat moist feet through Sparndam towards Haarlem. I stopped just after 11:00 to get some breakfast and ate it on the Leidsevaart, just opposite Patronaat where Alex & I had seen Delta Sleep just the other week. Just as the last few years, I was walking without a backpack – just a bank card, a phone, earbuds, and a few other pocket items. Long distance walks in the Netherlands pretty much always take you past a supermarket, a petrol station, a café or a rest stop where you can get a snack. A super friendly coot swam up to the edge of the water and kept me company.

Breakfast on the Leidsevaart in Haarlem.
My coot friend

Taking a rest in Haarlem gave me a chance to dry out my socks and shoes a little bit, and to tape up my feet where I was developing some blister hot spots. (Medical tape is one of my essential pocket items on a long walk.) Then I carried on south along the Leidsevaart (Haarlem is lovely) and entered the dunes for the last third of the walk.

We had gone to the dunes with Patrick and Teresa for a short walk last year, but it’s not an area I’ve spent a lot of time. It’s beautiful! I stopped for something to drink at café ‘t Panneland, which looks like a great jumping-off point for day trips and little expeditions. Then I walked a stretch along the banks of the Oosterkanaal, which is quiet because it’s a little off the main walking tracks. A pair of swans were nesting at one of the crossings. Swans are big. Lots of other birds to see here as well. I definitely need to come back.

Nesting swans

I hit the marathon distance at 15:18, still in the dunes. My end goal was the lighthouse at Noordwijk, so I still had a few kilometers left to go. I took the rest of the way at a leisurely pace, and treated myself to a large strawberry milkshake from the snackbar near the lighthouse. Abi arrived to meet me shortly after I got there. We wandered over to Strandpaviljoen De Zeemeeuw for a piece of apple pie, then walked along the beach for a bit before heading back to the car and driving home. This is a nice little routine we’re developing: I do a long walk with somewhere pretty as the destination, Abi drives to pick me up at the end, and we have a piece of appeltaart or a light afternoon meal while we’re there, and we discover a new place.

One final note: this year’s main innovation was wearing a cap. I have a bad tendency to forget to wear sun cream, and I lots my nice pair of sunglasses a couple of years ago. I knew I was going to be walking south-ish a lot, with the sun in my face. I could have ordered a cap from just about anywhere, but Alex and I went to a couple gigs in the last few weeks, and I picked up a cap from the merch stand at ASIWYFA in Tilburg. It was a great €25 investment! It’s soft, and has a subtle logo design based on their album Gangs. I did put on sunscreen before I left the house in the morning, but the cap kept the sun out of my eyes and off much of my face. I spent less time squinting and feeling uncomfortably exposed. Definitely recommended.

ASIWYFA cap merch

My legs and knees stiffened up by the end of the evening, but after a good night’s sleep I’m feeling fine this morning. A little stiff and sore, but that’s expected. Minimal blisters. Annual self-check: passed ✅.

Del Amitri at the Big Top on the Lodge Grounds, North Berwick Fringe By The Sea Festival, Saturday 3 August 2024

I think that Del Amitri’s 1989 album Waking Hours was the first CD I bought after moving to Scotland after secondary school. (It’s a long time ago.) It’s definitely an album I listened to a lot. I definitely remember listening to a tape of it on a portable cassette player on a long overnight bus ride between St. Andrews and London.

I never saw the band live until recently. My parents moved to North Berwick a few years ago, and North Berwick hosts a little offshoot of the Edinburgh Fringe festival every year: Fringe By The Sea. They’ve hosted some big (Scottish) names in the Big Top venue: Texas, Travis, and in 2024 Del Amitri. I had hoped that my parents could come along to see them as well, but the disabled access is limited and there were no suitable tickets left. My dad got me a ticket, and I went along on my own.

It was a pleasant evening in early August. I got to the Lodge Grounds way early. I was pretty much first in line when the stewards gathered people for the queue, and I got a great spot right in front of the stage. When my mental health is in a good state (i.e. not 2023/24), I like getting to a gig early and spending the time to enjoy the opening act(s), because they’re a great way to find new music I’m likely to enjoy. I’m thinking Bleu (opening for Toad the Wet Sprocket in Boston in 2003), Zoë Keating (opening for Imogen Heap in 2006), Thumpers (opening for Chvrches in 2013), etc. I can add Mandrake Handshake to that list. I don’t think they’re destined to be huge, but I loved them. They played a lush, groovy, modern psychedelic set that had me swaying along to their rich orchestration and easy rhythms. Honestly, the evening could have ended after them and I would have walked away happy.

Mandrake Handshake in the Big Top at Fringe By The Sea

Del Amitri came on later, and played a long, wide-ranging set full of favourites and crowd-pleasers. Lead singer Justin Currie has Parkinson’s, and from close up to the stage I could see a tremble in his hands when they weren’t actually playing his bass or holding the microphone. His voice is not as strong as it once was, but when you’ve got 2500 people in the crowd singing along to the familiar choruses, you can afford to hold back a little and roll with the room.

Set list:

  1. Musicians and Beer
  2. All Hail Blind Love
  3. Always the Last to Know
  4. Opposite View
  5. Kiss this Thing Goodbye
  6. Not Where It’s At
  7. Mockingbird, Copy Me Now
  8. Driving with the Brakes On
  9. Move Away Jimmy Blue
  10. You Can’t Go Back
  11. Roll to Me
  12. Here and Now
  13. Tell Her This
  14. Lonely
  15. The Ones that You Love Lead You Nowhere
  16. Spit in the Rain

Big encore:

  1. Missing Person
  2. Be My Downfall
  3. Nothing Ever Happens
  4. Gone in a Second
  5. Stone Cold Sober

Being close to the stage I got some nice photos of the bands. (I had rented a Fujifilm X-H2 for this week I was over in Scotland, because I was taking a boat trip out to the Isle of May to see the puffins and other sea birds. I didn’t have a press pass, so I didn’t bring that to the gig with me.) My favourite photo of the evening, however, turned out to be a sideways shot of a steward, lit by the setting sun falling through the open flaps of the big top tent.

The cost of touring, for bands

As a frequent concert-goer (mostly for bands that don’t sell out huge arenas) and as a notorious over-thinker (of everything), I often stand in the crowd at a gig and wonder how the finances work out for a band on tour. A couple of years ago Adam Neely made a video breaking down the costs of touring for his band Sungazer. Last month, Los Campesinos! shared a post giving details of the cost of playing a gig in Dublin.

Like Adam Neely, they clearly get people encouraging them to cut costs by forcing themselves to work under worse conditions:

Often when this conversation is had in the public domain, people will make statements like, “you can save money by sleeping in the van, or crashing on someone’s sofa” attempting to turn things into the dril candles meme. To those people, I say “grow up”.

I love music, and I love seeing artists play live. I kinda hate that the economics of this work out so poorly for them. The best I can do for them most of the time is to buy their music on a platform like Bandcamp (instead of, or as well as streaming it, because streaming is pretty convenient), showing up for them when they’re on tour, and buying their merch at the gig. (I’m very good at buying the merch.) But I wish that the music business was healthier, and could provide a more stable living for more people.

Related: the new album “Bicker” by Orchards is very good.

No billionaires

In his latest newsletter “On Having a Maximum Wealth” Hamilton Nolan discusses the idea of a “level cap” for real life:

The single most ridiculous aspect of human history is how much of it has been driven by the goal of allowing a tiny portion of a large population to live in luxury. This is a theme found, to varying degrees, in society after society across the world: A lot of people with a low standard of living working in service of the goal of raising the standard of living for some sort of ruler or supreme leader and his family and allies. I understand that this is not some sort of revelation. “You’ve discovered class,” you are now saying in a mocking tone. Beyond the social and political and economic dynamics underlying this process, though—things that make up magisterial fields of inquiry—I think that every once in a while it is well worth taking a moment to gape at the basic ludicrousness of this fact. As societal goals go, an honest reading tells us that we are often not aiming for “better technology” or “philosophical progress.” No, the reality is that, thousands of years and around the globe, the primary purpose of all the work that everyone is doing is “allowing a few jerks and their unbearable kids to live lavishly.” Countless millions through millennia have suffered, dragging stones to build pyramids and losing fingers in dirty factories and getting black lung so that Some Guy Somewhere can sit on a soft pillow and enjoy delicacies. 

What an absurd, idiotic goal to organize human society around. Wow!

I’m here for it.

Bilderbuch at Melkweg, Amsterdam, Tuesday 26 March 2024

I think I first came across Bilderbuch in 2015 or 2016; I remember sharing their track “OM” in a “New Music Monday” collaborative playlist at work. Their rich, genre-bending pop sound invited obvious comparisons with Falco, and I loved it. When I visited Julian in hospital in Austria at the start of 2019, I remember seeing their name on a poster in Innsbruck. It was probabaly for a gig or an album release. I jumped back into their catalogue, and found myself listening to “Checkpoint” on infinite repeat on my train journeys through the snow for the rest of that trip.

Since then I was waiting for them to play a show somewhere closer than Cologne, and last year they finally touched down in Amsterdam in March. I was still in deep burnout at work, and despite loving the band, and having bought a ticket as soon as I found out about the gig months before, I wasn’t excited on the day. I had to force myself to go into town. I skipped the support act (Kässy). As a latecomer, I had to squeeze myself into a corner of the Oude Zaal at Melkweg to get a barely decent view.

The gig was good, though. They kicked off with the powerful riffs and playful solos of “Softpower”, and carried on with the groovy “Dino”. Singer Maurice Ernst started off in a shirt and tie. He teased and flirted with the crowd and lost the shirt part-way through, but then gained a tight black crop-top. There were a ton of German fans in the audience, and a lot of singing along. Their live version of “Aber Airbags” is an extended, slow and trippy guitar solo tour that turns lively and up-tempo half-way through a 15-minute run, bursting with exuberance and a driving, bouncy beat. And of course they played “Spliff” as well. Amsterdam, innit.

Set list:

  1. Softpower
  2. Dino
  3. Gigolo
  4. Drugs
  5. Bungalow
  6. Willkommen im Dschungel
  7. Aber Airbags
  8. Maschin
  9. Ab und Auf
  10. Checkpoint

Encore:

  1. Digitales Wunder
  2. Spliff
  3. Bluezone

De Staat: Red, Yellow, Blue concert series at Paradiso, Amsterdam, 29-31 January 2024

Concert series poster on the wall outside Paradiso. Note how the different colour images feature all five band members equally: a nice touch.

I came to De Staat late in life, but after seeing them live in 2022 I resolved that I would definitely try to catch them again. In 2023 they announced that they were going to try something ambitious and experimental to support their Red, Yellow, and Blue project. In a small number of festivals and venues in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe, they would play a three-day concert series, with a different set list each evening to match one of the three colours. Red covers their heavier material, Yellow has some of their less classifiable tracks, and Blue is more moody and downbeat.

Paradiso was one of the venues. Although you could get tickets for specific shows, I immediately bought a passepartout ticket for all three nights. I wasn’t disappointed!

Although there were some tickets still available on the night for a couple of the shows, Paradiso was packed. Each show had different set dressing, different lighting (of course), and a different opening act. Many of the fans in the audience were wearing matching colours. On Red Monday I found a place up on the second balcony, facing the stage. Iron Jinn played a suitably dark and sludgy set. For De Staat there was a large speaker at the back of the stage for Torre Florim to perch on, and a tall pulpit that rose up from behind the curtains late in the set. As always at their gigs, there was a huge circular rotating mosh for the song “Witch Doctor”. (One of the reasons I’d positioned myself up on high…)

De Staat at Paradiso, Red show

On Yellow Tuesday, Smudged played a wild and punky opening set, with all band members decked out in green face paint. I was on the first balcony to the right of the stage this evening. This time, De Staat had a set of stairs at the centre of the stage, leading up to a huge lighting rig. The song “Pikachu” is one of the centrepieces of their show, and as well as doing their dance on stage, Rocco and Torre took it down into the audience as well.

De Staat at Paradiso, Yellow show

Dutch singer Pitou opened the show on Blue Wednesday, and she joined the band on stage for a haunting and entrancing rendition of “I’ll Take You”. The band had a second drummer on stage, and you know you’re in for a good time with two drummers. I was on the second balcony again, but this time off to the left of the stage. (Probably the worst view of the three shows, but it did give some interesting photo perspectives.)

De Staat at Paradiso, Blue show
De Staat at Paradiso, Blue show

Because I came to De Staat late, I had spent more time listening to their more recent material than their full back catalogue. They played 48 songs over the three shows, and to fill all three evenings evenings they brought out a lot of songs I hadn’t paid much attention to before. Hearing them live really brought them to life, and I think I might now rate their 2013 album I_CON as my favourite. The raucous guitar hooks on “Make Way for the Passenger”, the incredible rumble of drums on “The Inevitable End”, the Beastie Boys echoes on “Input Source Select”, and the memories of Pitou’s voice gracing “I’ll Take You” all combine to give me chills whenever I hear the recorded versions now.

This concert series was an amazing experience. It absolutely cemented De Staat as a “must see” band for me whenever they tour again.

Set Lists:

Monday 29 January – Red

  1. Look at Me
  2. Ah, I See
  3. Life is a Game (Ladadi Ladadada)
  4. Me Time
  5. Old Macdonald Don’t Have No Farm No More
  6. Refugee
  7. Paying Attention
  8. Some Body
  9. Make Way for the Passenger
  10. Murder Death
  11. Help Yourself
  12. Burning the Flag
  13. Meet the Devil
  14. Head on the Block
  15. Witch Doctor

Encore:

    1. Rooster-Man
    2. Kitty

    Tuesday 30 January – Yellow

    1. Danger
    2. Peptalk
    3. Blues is Dead
    4. Numbers Up
    5. Psycho Disco
    6. Input Source Select
    7. Habibi
    8. Fake It Till You Make It
    9. Mona Lisa
    10. Pikachu
    11. Make the Call, Leave It All
    12. Sweatshop
    13. Get on Screen

    Encore

    1. Bombti
    2. Who’s Gonna Be the GOAT?

    Wednesday 31 January – Blue

    1. Take Root
    2. Devil’s Blood
    3. I’m a Rat
    4. Someone to Be
    5. Keep Me Home
    6. One Day
    7. Firestarter
    8. I’ll Never Marry You
    9. Luther
    10. She’s With Me (Torre Florim solo)
    11. I’ll Take You (with Pitou)
    12. Running Backwards Into The Future
    13. Time Will Get Us Too
    14. The Inevitable End

    Encore

    1. What Goes, Let Go
    2. Phoenix