Staphorst Travel Guide – Found Myself in a Strange Town

Staphorst Travel Guide

I visited Staphorst quite some time ago. My apologies if any of its little quirks no longer exist. Due to rising sea levels, bush fires or military invasion by one of our crazier world leaders, the place itself may no longer exist. In which case, I wouldn’t bother going there.

I think it only appears once every hundred years anyway, so you’ll be taking your chances.

Staphorst is a village nestling in the middling north of The Netherlands, quite close to the end of the rainbow. I’m still not quite sure where it is. It’s not in Holland, apparently. I thought you could always refer to the whole country as Holland. This being easier on the syllables. Since 2019 you have to call it ‘The Netherlands’, or they get quite upset. They’ve always had the hump about us calling it Holland. We’ve been winding them up for years with our laziness.

‘Holland’ only describes a region of The Netherlands containing only 38% of the population. It comprises just two provinces on the coast. One of them does include Amsterdam though. I presume you can send a postcard from Amsterdam that says ‘Having a Lovely Time in Holland’, without the postman spitting on it.

I know my plane landed somewhere in The Netherlands, or even Holland, after that it was a bit of a blur. My blindfold and the heavily tinted car windows didn’t help. There is a great deal of secrecy surrounding Staphorst. Nobody knows where it is from one year to the next, it even moves around on maps to stop people finding it. Tall reeds grow around the village and the mist rolling across the marshy flatlands hides it from view. There are those that say strange things happen there.

Incidentally, I was supposed to be impressed by all this hocus-pocus.

I’d gone to The Netherlands to see a printing company in the nearby city of Meppel, which is probably another place you’ve never heard of. Meppel has a very long history of printing, the city even has a museum dedicated to it. With many years of practice, you might think they would have mastered it by now. Well, you’d be wrong.

I was sent there to deliver a severe arse-kicking to a printer that had recently produced a very expensive limited-edition book for my company. There are millions of books printed every year, but this one had a difference. The unique feature of this book was that the pages fell out and fluttered to the ground after ten minutes of reading.

I’d been tasked with finding out if they produced the book with proper binding glue, or whether they’d tried to save money by printing it on something akin to Post-it notes. Such was the printing company’s embarrassment at this faux pas they’d paid for my flights and arranged my accommodation.

I think the printer assumed I might enjoy staying somewhere typically Dutch, like Staphorst. Perhaps this was in the hope that I would be charmed by their thoughtfulness. This might mean that their corporate behinds would receive only some light spanking with a soft slipper, rather than the full-blooded thrashing with a horse-whip my boss was after.

The driver they’d sent to pick me up from the airport told me about Staphorst. He started out by saying it was a very religious community and strictly regulated.

“Sounds like it’s going to be a laugh a minute,” I murmured to myself in the back of the car.

He went on to tell me that the folks of Staphorst disapprove of most modern things including cars, television, abortions and blood transfusions. I had no doubt that they would disapprove of a lot of my bad habits too.

They wear traditional Dutch costume and go to church, not once, but twice on Sundays. I assume this is just for the fun of it. Also on the Sabbath, the roads into the village are closed and no work can be carried out by the villagers. Likewise, all the shop windows must be shuttered. This is to both ward off temptation and to stop the goods on display ‘working’ on behalf of the shop-owner.

As you can imagine, I was looking forward to staying in such a riotous and hedonistic place.

The driver deposited me at the printing company in Meppel first, where I met the owner. Rather than us getting stuck into the uncomfortable business of frictionless book binding, he whisked me straight off to the nearby village of Giethoorn for lunch.

Giethoorn is known as ‘The Venice of the North’, but then again so are a number of other places including Amsterdam, Bruges, St Petersburg, and even Birmingham. I trust that whoever gave these places this nickname has never actually visited Venice. It may well be a catchy tourist-hook for Birmingham, but I can’t ever recall seeing supermarket trolleys and knackered fridges in the canals of Venice.

The appellation gets given to Giethoorn because it has a large number of inland islands criss-crossed by numerous canals. After lunch, my host insisted on punting me around these quiet little islets to see their florally bedecked houses and their manicured lawns. It’s very nice, but once you’ve seen one hanging basket you’ve seen them all. I found myself longing for a knackered fridge to spoil the overwhelming tweeness.

We eventually left the quiet waterways, and their cutesy little cottages, and drifted silently into a huge man-made lake. This still and placid lake goes on for miles, but never gets any deeper than three feet. Given the depth, there was little chance of the tedium being interrupted by an attack from a killer whale, or even a killer trout for that matter.

I still hadn’t raised the sensitive subject of the escapee book pages. I thought it best to leave it until the next day. I was on a punt in the middle of a deserted lake with a man I’d only just met.

Once safely back on dry land, he drove me to Staphorst, where I was going to stay for two nights. The village was as it had been described, all churches and clogs. It was very quiet; no music, no traffic and none of the background hum of modern life. The only noise to be heard was the mooing of cows coming from a number of barns. The printer knew some of the villagers so he asked a farmer to take me into one of them.

Both sides of the barn were lined with rustic wooden stalls, each containing a big-eyed, brown and white cow. They were quite docile and very receptive to a stroke behind the ear, mooing their appreciation softly and licking my hand. As cows go, these were quite pleasant ones.

There were also calves in the barn, smaller than their mothers but with eyes that seemed twice as large. They were the cutest calves ever, almost worthy of having their own Disney film.

The cows were sheltering inside for the evening but they were also there for milking. At the behest of the farmer, one of the milkmaids sat on a three-legged stool, positioned a bucket, and demonstrated traditional hand-milking. As you can surmise, the printer was on a charm offensive. We’d done his canals and now we were doing Dutch dairy farming.

He then had the farmer bring me some cheese to take home with me. The farmer could even point to Lotte and Hendrika as being responsible for it. These were the names of the cows that had produced the milk, not the milkmaids. Although you never quite know what goes on in Staphorst, and what they make their cheese from.

My lodgings in the village were interesting enough. I had a large double-room above a restaurant. I think it was the only guest room they had. I believe it was also the village’s bridal suite. No doubt generations of Staphorsters were conceived upon that very bed.

I did look for conjugal clues, but they’d obviously changed the sheets since the last wedding. That may have only been the day before though. Staphorst has one of the highest birth-rates in Europe. Presumably this religious community isn’t too keen on contraception, but I’m sure it has plenty of shotguns to wave if a bun mistakenly ends up in the oven.

The restaurant was good, nay excellent. Upon the waiter’s recommendation, I had their specialty meal of thirteen-courses of traditional Dutch food. It was probably the best meal I’ve ever had. He also brought me a couple of very expensive bottles of fine wine. The printer was paying for it, why skimp?

I was the only diner in there that evening and I’d occasionally catch a glimpse of the kitchen staff staring at me from across the room. The owner, however, never once looked up from sharpening his knives on a grindstone.

I retired early as the hefty meal and the wine had made me sleepy. The kitchen staff were silent as they watched me ascend the stairs. One of the girls genuflected. I smiled at her uneasily and, rather than return my look, she quickly cast her eyes to the floor.

The bed was unusual in that it was located in a recess in the wall (to the left of the chair in the picture). Once you’d climbed up into the bed, you closed the little doors behind you to shut out the light. It was a little like spending the night in a cupboard, in the hope that the bogeyman won’t see you hiding there.

I awoke with a start in the middle of the night. It wasn’t the bogeyman, but I did notice that I was now missing an arm. Perhaps the bogeyman had taken it whilst I slept. My shock on discovering this was only short-lived. I thought I could remember the car-driver telling me that the nocturnal amputation of a limb is a traditional welcome for visitors in this rural part of the country.

Inconvenient though this handicap was going to be, I had to look at my predicament philosophically. In this increasingly globalised world, where people and places are becoming increasingly homogenised, we ought to respect local customs. We should not complain too loudly, even when they cause us some minor irritation.

This attitude was very gracious of me, and I congratulated myself on how I was dealing with the situation. It was only then that I remembered I’d brought a large quantity of the faulty books with me in, not one, but two suitcases. How the devil was I going to carry both of them with only one arm?

It was only this sudden luggage-panic that was enough to wake me from my dream.

The meeting the next day regarding the books went well. The company examined the samples I’d brought with me. They concurred that something had gone amiss with the production process. As we thought, it appeared that the binding glue was at fault.

They’d roped in their local glue supplier to attend the meeting. He went through a lengthy presentation which explained how their traditional glue was made. He also had a video which wasn’t for the faint-hearted. This was because they made animal glue.

This doesn’t mean it is a glue for mending broken cows, but that the glue is made from dead cows. Their hides, hooves and teeth are rendered down to make the stuff. They also throw in a bit of pig and horse too.

The opinion of the glue man was that it was a faulty batch; maybe too much pig, not enough cow, and perhaps it could have done with a pinch more horse.

You have to bear in mind that I was in a farming community. Scraping every last vestige of tissue from whatever livestock they had was second nature to them. I was still hungover and I’d been feeling queasy to start with.

The printer and his glue-man assured me the books would be reprinted and then bound with a new batch of fresh animal glue. Indeed, the work had already begun in producing it.

I returned to my hotel in Staphorst for my last night. This time there was no noise to be heard in the village whatsoever. The silence of the cows was deafening.

The book turned out nice though.

To see my travel guides about other places in The Netherlands click here.