Skip to main content

Adventures in Almere

I'm just back from a visit to Almere in the Netherlands. For those not familiar with the place, it's a new town (pronounced roughly Ahl-meer-uh), about 30 minutes train ride from Amsterdam.

I was there to give a short talk based on Ecologic as part of a lecture evening on sustainability and eco-cities. As no great fan of flying (and it would have seemed a touch hypocritical, given the topic) I went by train.

On the whole the train travel worked very well, though I was amazed that I couldn't book a through ticket online, and ended up having to book with three separate agencies to get a train from Swindon to Almere. It also reflected badly on British rail pricing. To get from Swindon to London (80 miles) cost £109. From London to Brussels (193 miles) £88. and from Brussels to Almere (137 miles) £71. (All prices are for return journeys, and distances are by road, but give a reasonable indication.)

There's still something special about standing on St Pancras International station and seeing trains heading off to destinations like Paris and Brussels - it's commonplace in mainland Europe, but there was a frisson of excitement for me.

The event itself, run by the International New Town Institute, took place in Almere's starkly beautiful theatre on the waterfront. It was humbling as an English speaker. There were four lecturers and an audience of about 100. Most of the audience were Dutch, as were two of the lecturers, the moderator, the local mayor who took part in the closing discussion session, and the director of INTI who opened the event. But the whole thing was run effortlessly in English. I was particularly impressed by the presentation by architect Winy Maas, who managed to get through about 150 Powerpoint slides in 30 minutes - often almost subliminally - yet somehow it worked to get his message across.

On the way back, it struck me that Brussels has the most confusing railway stations in the world. Central station is a different station to Midi station... but Suid station and Midi station are the same place.

An excellent couple of days all told.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope