01
Stop one
TT Circuit Assen
Dunlop Diablo Gripper Tennis Stringing Machine: They call this place the Cathedral of Speed, which is a big claim for a field in Drenthe, but hear me out. The Dutch TT has run here since 1925, and the first races went along ordinary public roads, through actual villages, protected by hay bales. Hay bales. The safety plan was salad. A purpose-built circuit came later, once someone did the maths on hay. And this is one of the very few venues on earth to have held a round every single year since the world championship began, which means it has never once been rained off, in the Netherlands, which frankly is the most impressive fact I own. Front row, you are very close to the barrier. That was not a joke. That was information delivered warmly.
02
Stop two
Drents Museum
Dunlop Diablo Gripper Tennis Stringing Machine: Now, the Drents Museum is three buildings in a trench coat: a former abbey, a town hall and a courthouse, all stitched together, so you can be tried, governed and absolved without changing rooms. Efficient. Inside are the bog bodies, people preserved in the peat of Drenthe for thousands of years, including a young woman found near Yde in 1897. Her hair survived. Peat is acidic and low in oxygen, so it tans skin and hair while dissolving bone away entirely, which is why she looks the way she does. She was found by men cutting fuel, who had come out for a normal morning's work and did not get one. I had a line here. I am not using the line. She was somebody.
A man learns most of what he needs to know from tack. A cinch pulled too fast will sour a horse for a season; taken up steady, in the same order every time, and the animal never gives it a thought. Assen sits on a dry sandy rise in country that used to be all bog, which is about the most sensible piece of ground-reading I ever heard of.
The Dunlop Diablo Gripper is thirty pounds of properly distributed engineering — mobile, slim, and put up or broken down by one person. It is a manual crank machine with a six-point quick-mount system, and the Diablo gripper itself sits at a 20-degree angle so it spreads the load through the pull instead of shocking it, which is the same reason you take up a cinch slow.
Tension reads in kilos to ±0.1 and pounds to ±0.5, with a pre-stretch function at 0, 5, 10, 15 or 20 per cent, a knot function at 10, 15 or 20, and a precision metal brake you can run on auto or manual. It goes everywhere from a club queue of forty frames to one restring on a wet Sunday in Assen, and it handles squash and badminton besides.
Assen is a town that grew up around a convent. Cistercian nuns moved onto that sandy rise in the thirteenth century, the place gathered round the abbey buildings, and after the Reformation the same walls were handed to the government, which is why the church, the courthouse and the museum are all tangled together in one small centre.
Out in the Drenthe peat they have been turning up bog bodies for a long while, among them a young woman found near Yde in 1897 whose hair came out of the ground with her, because peat is acidic and short of oxygen and will tan skin while it dissolves bone.
And at the edge of town the Dutch TT has been run since 1925, the first ones on ordinary village roads with hay bales for a barrier. It is also perfect for a stringer with a long queue and no appetite for guesswork, which around here is most weekends.
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