Just before Xmas Eve the South wind blows a gale right outside our window. Big storms are forecast for England across the North Sea, but slightly more moderate weather predicted here in the Lowlands.

On Sunday, I went down to Rotterdam by train and walked three miles to the old docklands. Through the bustling city centre and across the huge Erasmus Bridge. Erasmus, that giant of Renaissance and Reformative thought, but Catholic to the end, is much respected and honoured in Rotterdam.

The bridge across the Maas, an immense river, soars through the grey sky with dark clouds scudding above and rain like hailstones whipping in under the hood of my coat. Big cargo barges and ocean liners ply the slate water. The Dutch, completely at home in this weather, walk and ride their bikes across the bridge, while I stagger trying to take that one memorable photo.

The wide Maas, carrying most of the water of the Rhine as well, flows west to the sea as it has done for thousands of years. Parts of Switzerland, Germany, France and Belgium are swirling around below me. This is supposedly the oldest river in the world, but how they’d calculate that I have no idea.

High modern buildings flank the water and its bridge. The old docklands, largely flattened by German bombing 70 years ago, have been revitalised as a sort of museum of modern design, structures of glass and steel leaning and cantilevered at all angles as though the whole district were a modernist magazine. Not far from here, just beyond the north bank, is the Netherlands Architectural Institute with a comprehensive display of the historical development of European architecture in the modern era. The city of Rotterdam itself is its major canvas.

Here and there are pockets of older neighbourhoods that somehow survived the Nazis and then two generations of urban renewal. Typical Dutch brick houses and warehouses with gables and shutters. The contrast should jar but somehow they sit together in consensus. The Dutch way, the polder mentality.

The Lowlands have a long history of cooperative decision making, necessitated by the fight against water and the long, long struggle to reclaim land. Large parts of Holland (being just part, one might unofficially claim, of the whole of the Netherlands) are actually below sea level. The little canals that define the rectangular polders drain original swamp water into the larger canals, and into the main rivers like the Maas and Rhine. The famous windmills, while also industrial engines, served mainly to pump the water up step by step until it could flow to the sea.

The Rhine itself reaches the Netherlands near the city of Nijmegen, where it forks to become the River Waal and mostly diverts towards the Maas near Rotterdam. The “Old Rijn” still flows on past Utrecht and through Leiden, as it did even in Roman times when it formed the northernmost frontier of their long-vanished empire. It reaches the sea at Katwijk and trickles through a sluice gate with a pond of plastic rubbish behind it. An ignominious finale for a mighty river, leaking onto the beach where Caligula ordered his legions to pick up shells because they looked so pretty gleaming in the sunlight.

Here and there you find remnants and references to those Roman conquerors, such as some bricks in the fireplace of a country house called Duivenvoorde just south of Leiden. And there’s a Roman milepost beside the highway at Valkenburg, next to the main Dutch Airforce base. But the Romans, like all the other conquerors - Vikings, Spanish, French, English and German - have disappeared while the solid respectable Dutch continue with their consensus and their tolerance and their humour that largely displays itself without laughter. They are so tolerant that they tolerate intolerance. For example, many if not most of the “real Dutch” people are disturbed by the influx of Turks and Moroccans with their bad manners and loud voices on the trains, their leering at girls and speeding motor scooters zipping round the narrow lanes. Nearly all the Dutch ride bikes, fietsen, it’s a national trademark. But the Moroccans (Maroks) ride bromfiets, noisily and antisocially.
However, tolerance requires that their behaviour is tolerated. That’s part of the polder mentality.

So brick warehouses with inlaid titles like Sumatra and Lombok sit patiently beneath the soaring 21st century towers. Waiting patiently, wearing their patina of dilapidation until they can be gentrified as expensive dockland apartments.

As dusk creeps in, about 4 o’clock (this is Europe in early winter) the street lamps glow in the gloom and one of the huge tour ships starts to sound its horn. Long blows in the twilight announcing departure for America, just as ships have done from this port for centuries.

The lights of the SS Rotterdam illuminate the banks of the wide river as it glides like her majesty out into the North Sea and then further to the Atlantic.

Behind the old brick and concrete warehouses a little square - actually a triangle - has been decked out with coloured lights and wood-fire braziers. It’s almost Christmas and there’s a sleigh ride pulled by a horse and a choir singing Dutch and English Carols, and kids all rugged up in scarves. Cafes and bars are open with stalls on the pavement and the local community - all Dutch, not Muslim, are celebrating Christmas together.

Again I take a lot of photos but, again, none of them can convey what it’s actually like.

I walk across what seems to have been an island between the Rijn Haven and Maas Haven, looking at the lights and decorations that are not very different from those at home. I’m thinking of two Dutch short stories I’ve just read, in fact the book is still in my bag, from the period of World War 1, by a writer unknown outside of Amsterdam. One story is “”De Uitvreter” and the other is “The Little Titans”. They both say the same sort of thing, but the first is whimsical and affirming while the second is sad and almost depressive.

In youth, Nescio says, we believe the world is wide and wonderful, but wrong, and assume that we will change it in due course. In middle age we give up, allow ourselves to be co-opted, become part of the problem (because we can no longer envision any solution). Things go on as always, rivers flow to the sea, younger generations come and then grow old. One character, the “freeloader” or “uitvreter” of the first story, just steps off a bridge into the Waal as his way of coping with life, or maybe as his way of putting meaning into life. If you only read one of these stories, make it that one.

Later, right before Xmas Eve, South Holland was buffeted by an even bigger windstorm. I couldn’t sleep listening to the house shaking and century-old timbers creaking and far-off doors banging. All the untold and unfathomable noises of a wild night like the whispering of the worlds.

The morning gave us a wintry day, not cold but always threatening. People scrambled through the narrow streets for last minute shopping. Rows of bikes were blown over by sudden gusts. Clatter clatter clatter in a chain reaction or like a line of dominos falling. It started raining about midday and I got soaked going to the shops, had to change my pants and dry off my boots under the heater.

But then the storm settled as it always does on the eve of Christ’s birth, or as a pagan might prefer - the midwinter festival. I go for a walk about 11 o’clock through wet historic streets, listening to hymns and carols from the catholic church in what would be the town square, except that Leiden is so old and chaotic it doesn’t have a centre. The wind has dropped and the calm of christmas eve descends on the whole of Holland. The choral voices carry across the Old Rhine, past the little castle on the man-made hill, built around 1250 as a shelter from the floods.

People arrive at the church as others are leaving, all well dressed in double breasted coats, neatly folded scarves and leather gloves. The establishment, or at least men with connections.

I walk through narrow lanes towards Pieterskerk over cobblestones wet and shiny in the lamplight. This is the oldest part of the city, very picturesque by day. It includes a house Rembrandt lived in, and the Latin School he attended. The limestone church was there when William the Silent relieved the Spanish Siege during the 80 Years War in 1574, effectively setting Holland on its course towards modern nationhood. There’s a courtyard in front flanked by a garden wall and the House of the Counts of Holland, the seat of the rulers for 500 years. It’s a quiet and reflective little square, but on the other side of the Palace is another square where criminals and traitors were publicly executed. A medieval brick tower holds a gallery from which the ladies watched the executions.

I hear voices from within the Pieterskerk, but no carols. A few lights in the high stained glass windows. Another well dressed man goes towards the huge doors and pushes past a square dark figure, who then lurches suddenly towards me.

She speaks at me in Dutch and then guttural English, asking if I know her. I do in fact recognise her as one of the homeless from Centraal Station, she’s always scamming one way or another, and this time she’s selling postcards.

And it’s christmas eve and that line from the Pogues’ song is running through my head, the boys of the NYPD choir still singin’ “Galway Bay” and the bells are ringing out for Xmas Day.

So maybe she’s a drunk and a prostitute but I’ve got money in me kick as Australians used to say, and the good burghers are all rugged up and going their own way, so I pull out the first note I find in my wallet and give her twenty euro. She kisses me and luckily I turn my head and it lands on my cheek.

I venture on along the Rapenburg, once famous as the grand avenue of the city, rivalling the canals of Amsterdam. Except Leiden has only one of them, tree-lined and curved so elegantly. Many prominent and famous people have lived along here including the anthropologist Siebold who opened Japan to the Dutch before the Americans used their gunboats, and who’s house is now a museum. Nearby at Rapenburg 23 lived Rene Descartes, the French mathematician and writer known as the “father of modern philosophy” mainly because of his saying I think therefore I am. Not far to the southeast, across the next canal, I could have strolled to the home of Paul Ehrenfest and his mathematician wife Tatyana Afanasyeva who’d fled from anti-Jewish discrimination in Germany and Russia. Their “White House” on White Rose Street was the focus of many formal and informal meetings and discussions between the great minds of Europe in the early 20th Century, including Einstein who stayed often in the upstairs bedroom facing the Pieterskerk. All those visitors signed the wall and their signatures are still there, although the house is now closed to the public.

Their scientific and philosophic discussions helped transform the world as we know it today, with electric grids and controlled voltage, batteries for our iPads, quantum theory, nuclear physics, and all the technological good and bad we take for granted a century later. Of course, the world is a much better place this christmas eve than it was when those important people talked late into the night on White Rose Street nearly a hundred years ago. Isn't it? And the church bells rang then as they do now.

So many famous people inhabit the books written about this place, and Leiden has lots of books. At one stage it was the biggest publisher of banned and unacceptable texts in all of Europe. A haven for non-conformists and rebels.

And yet there are still the down and out and the homeless, hanging around the alleys near the station.

All the bells in the city are ringing by this late hour and I consider walking back across to van der Lubbe’s square but go past his memorial stone at the Morspoort instead. Mors in Dutch means “moors” or swamp and this was the swampy side of town in the 15th and 16th Century. Rather funny since most of central Holland sits in an extended swamp.

Outside this gate they located the hanging ground for common criminals, after the execution square near Pieterskerk ceased to be used because the large houses around there were bought up by rich merchants and academics. So we call this part of town “the gallows gate.”

Beside the picturesque 16th Century gate, unnoticed by most passers-by, is a grey stone cube inscribed for Marinus van der Lubbe. A local born communist, he set fire to the Reichstag in 1933 and gave Hitler the excuse to stage his seizure of power. He was later hanged at Liepzig.

Often portrayed as an idiot and a stooge, van der Lubbe is well honoured here, although he was clearly from the wrong side of town. An orphan, self educated, blind in one eye, expelled from the Dutch Communist Party for being too sincere. He twice tried to swim the English Channel for a bet, walked to Calais, slept in the fields, walked to Berlin and intended to walk on to Russia in 1933 because he’d heard it was a worker’s paradise.

On the way he tried to start a revolution in Germany by setting their parliament alight, was caught and executed, with no one there to speak for him or know who he really was.

Only small tour groups, mostly middle aged and all white, stop to look at this engraved stone and even then most of them turn to photograph the Morspoort instead.

So here in one little medieval city, on a cold yet still winter’s night, the night before christmas, a wanderer can find bits and pieces of history and minor fragments of significance.

The Galgewater, at the end of the Rapenburg near where the Rhine opens out to a small harbour, is now a ship museum. Little lights sway up the masts and down the rigging, giving the appearance of a row of illuminated xmas trees bobbing away to the west, as the river slowly glides to the sea.

As it has always done.

And just as I turn towards home I look up at the clear cold sky and the uncounted frozen stars. The Milky Way seems less crowded than in Australia but I find Orion’s belt and look lower to the left searching for the Pleiades. They’re not there. I stand on a cold bridge over the Old Rhine scanning the northern hemisphere, and yes, there they are, the Seven Sisters, to the right of Orion. To the right! It’s the opposite way round, here on top of the world!

Finally I stroll back down Haarlemmerstraat thinking about that line from Shane Maloney, a friend of mine in youth and now a crime writer. His character lies drunk in the gutter and looks up at the band of stars who speak to him - we may be tiny, but you are insignificant.

And so it goes, year after year.