Hoek to Köln

Holland: clean and tidy land of perfectly conceived infrastructure. Life below sea level demands it. Rush hour on the train towards Rotterdam and a computer voice bids everyone welcome in soft, reassuring tones at each stop: 'Ladies and gentlemen, good morning.' No need to rush. Each time she tells us which station is next her pitch rises at the end of her perfectly enunciated sentence, as if she's never been this way before and is pleasantly surprised that Schiedam or Vlaaningen is coming up because she hasn't seen them in a while. The train is light and seems spacious, even when full, and the commuters gaze out of the window, make occasional eye contact and don't look too sad at all about going to work. Perhaps later the same train will wish them good evening and ask them how their day was.

A stop for a couple of hours to visit a friend, Janneke, in Delft, a typical Dutch town of small shops and cafes around cobbled squares under plane trees or along ornamental canals full of lillies. People breeze around on bikes. On one street wildflowers and weeds have grown through the cracks; tall foxgloves sway like people meeting to say hello.

In the town square Janneke buys me a herring - a single raw fish that has been 'partly rotted' specially, she says, and garnished with a sprinkling of raw cooking onion. You grab the slippery creature by its tail and dangle it into your mouth. Utterly, utterly horrible squidgy spudgy oniony fish-goo. Two bites finished me off, although for some reason I now want another one. I think I could down a whole one given another chance at it, although food poisoning is surely only a few gobbets of decomposing herring away. I gave the rest of the fish to Janneke but guess what - she doesn't like them.

It is a good and perhaps mysterious thing: not to see someone often and still feel like friends, when other times people don't even need to move away to drift apart.

One of Janneke's jobs, by the way, is to help work out how to stop Holland from flooding when climate change pushes sea levels ever higher.

Through Rotterdam (the name somehow reminds me of that fish), Utrecht and to Köln, where the cathedral, and it is maybe THE cathedral the stands for all others, rises bomb-charred black and tremendous into the sky. They must have been so certain when they built it that the sky was where God had to be, and even that God had to be at all, and that God would be well pleased with those who pointed emphatically upwards, especially on an absurdly grand scale. Some would ridicule these huge follies but the Shard in London does just the same thing. The Shard has only itself to point to, which seems ridiculous to me. Köln Cathedral is absurd, but it isn't ridiculous. I walk through the doors into an organ recital, during one of those magnificent discordant blasts that goes on and on. Perhaps the organist has slumped over the keyboard having departed this life in style but no, the chord stops and the echo is left ringing until he or she is ready for the next piece. I wonder that there is a sort of sexual union between this explosive sound and the vast cathedral space that throws it about.

Hundreds of votive candles are flickering on large racks. A girl is turning over a fresh, unlighted one in her palm while waiting for the right prayer to come, then lights her wick from another's,face brightened and hypnotised by the flame. A man in a red robe rapidly collects hundreds of dead candles and chucks them loudly into a box for recycling. The wheat has been taken; the chaff is cleared away with the efficient ruthlessness of daily routine. Now the organ has finished, the space fills with the plastic clatter of spent prayers. By the time I'm on the train to Copenhagen my own will be among them, I suppose.