"Holland's Sphincter" a Katwijk aan Zee Travel Page by JohnnySpangles

Katwijk is a seaside town with lots of seaside and not a lot else. Its major claim to fame is its wonderful sluices. Which is a little like the desperation exhibited by Luton in boasting about being situated next to the M1 motorway.

However they are very impressive sluices and the best I’d seen that day. The sluices are a chain of draining gates that drain off the excess water from the dykes and canals that surround the flat fields of Holland. They sluices evacuate themselves into the sea at Katwijk. This explains why you can walk along the beach at Katwijk and find freshwater duckweed washed up onto the shore like a thick green carpet. Basically whatever comes out of the sluices goes into the sea and then some of it makes its way back onto the beach at high-tide. Therefore as well as finding sea-shells and cuttlefish bones on the beach you’re just as likely to come across soggy tulips, tree-branches and dead hedgehogs. In performing its role as the exit point for all the excess liquids and solids that Holland wishes to expel Katwijk effectively acts as the anus of Holland.

There are a few cafes and a few beach huts at Katwijk, and like the rest of Holland there’s plenty of clouds and rain. It also has wind a-plenty which attracts the wind-surfing, kite-surfing and surfing-surfing fraternity. These people are quite impressive to watch, especially the kite-surfers. Until you realise that they are actually pupils at a kite-surfing school and they have as much control over their huge kites as I had over my bowels after eating a dodgy salmon omelette the other evening. As they scoot along the surf at eighty miles per hour, their kites come dangerously close to the beach and with two-hundred pound breaking strain lines pulled cheesewire-taut by a force seven gale the chances of your loved ones being decapitated increase dramatically. Indeed it may explain the large number of severed heads that also get washed up on the beach.