Anna Holligan, the BBC correspondent for The Hague, who like many others is feeling the slump in news from the summer holiday, asked herself why the Dutch are so inseparable from their bikes. The piece she made can be found here, and shows one of the things of my country I'm particularly proud of: our cycling culture.

If you don't feel like reading, there's also a BBC Newsnight report in which she cycled with her "omafiets" ("granny bike" ) from The Hague to Westminster, to see whether it would also work for other countries (particularly the UK). In the clip, many places I cycled myself dozens of times, both in The Hague where I used to live and in Groningen where I'm living now. (Also check the 1,5 minutes compressed journey from parliament to the ferry, below the clip: many sights I've passed many times.)

I was also pointed to different short movie, which shows, in a little over 8 minutes, how our cycling culture came to be, why it was a good idea (then, as well as now) and how it can still be useful for other countries to implement. The main message, in the words of the narrator: "Build it, and they will use it".