A few days drive to get to our spot in the
sun: from Amsterdam to the Zeeland seaside town of Scheveningen,
home of world-record windsurfing wind and raw herring; then lovely
Brugge and onto the bloodsoaked boring
terrain of Belgium's Flanders fields, every town an infamous World
War One battle.
We stop in the drizzle at Tyne Cot, an Allied graveyard hard by Ypres ("Wipers"the tommies called it) in the middle of the Belgian countryside.