"From here, if you drive east, or better yet if you cycle east past Hee, Kaart, Baaiduinen, Midsland, Landerum, Formerum, Lies and Hoorn, on after Hoorn you arrive on a road to the end of the world. The end of the world? Not quite. First past that last little village. And then Siberia begins, as Wouter van Dieren wrote in a poem. That last village's name is – fittingly – Oosterend: East end.
I first made that journey forty-five years ago. With my parents and my two sisters. To Oosterend. The second farm on the right. That's where we stopped. That's where we stayed. Summer after summer. And a part of me has stayed there forever. Just a part? No, that's where I became a native of this island: a Terschellinger.
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Inside, next to the dining table hung a long poster, in a white glass frame. That poster must have been hanging there for a very long time. Because the colours were already faded and yellowed with age. It showed the protected flowers of Terschelling. Parnassia, the heath spotted-orchid, the marsh helleborine, the lesser butterfly orchid, the round-leaved wintergreen, the blue sea thistle, the beach morning glory, the sundew and the blue marsh gentian."
I spoke these words – these exact words – five years ago almost to the day in the Tonnenloods, just a few hundred metres away from behind this same, solid, timeless, dependable, driftwood lectern.