Why the Dutch are Different: A Journey into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands: From Amsterdam to Zwarte Piet, the acclaimed guide to travel in Holland

by Ben Coates

Wandering the canals of Delft or watching the royals wave from their balcony in Amsterdam, it was easy to agree with the German poet Heinrich Heine, who allegedly said that if a war ever broke out he would head straight for the Netherlands, because ‘everything happens fifty years later there’.

‘We’ll keep making the wrong decisions,’ a friend told me, ‘and we’ll keep enjoying the consequences.’

‘The Netherlands isn’t below sea level,’ a Dutchman on a ferry once told me. ‘The sea is above Netherlands level.’

‘Dordrecht, a place so beautiful, tomb of my cherished illusions,’ a lovesick Proust once called it. For Alexandre Dumas, it was ‘a smiling city’.

Before moving to the Netherlands I had been a keen runner and cyclist, but both activities seemed futile without either the challenge of an incline to ascend or the reward of a view from the top. The main road near my house was named Bergweg – ‘Mountain Road’ – but inclined so insignificantly that I couldn’t roll down it on my bike. When I did enter a short running race in Rotterdam, I received in the post written instructions on ‘How to Run Uphill’, lest I be unprepared for the slightly sloping bridge over which the race would pass. For the Dutch, life was lived in two dimensions.

I often got the impression that many Dutch people would find it perfectly acceptable for their children to be gay, divorced, unemployed or transsexual, but to have dirty windows or an untidy living room would bring great shame on the family. It was perhaps not a coincidence that the Dutch word for ‘beautiful’ and the Dutch word for ‘clean’ were one and the same – schoon.

Watching anaemic debate programmes and reading pallid newspapers, I could never quite decide whether the Dutch determination to agree to disagree was a mark of civilised society, or just very tedious.

I could also see how love of the game could become self-sustaining: if you cared about the club, you’d make friends and buy a season ticket and follow every game closely, making you care about the result even more. For people who perhaps didn’t have much money or status at work, and for young men eager to emphasise their masculinity, passionate support for a club could even offer a shortcut to a kind of elevated social status. You might get shouted at by your boss all week and by your wife and kids in the evening, but here, proving your passion in the stadium and in the bar afterwards, you could be a lion.

The Netherlands, for all its faults, was happier than Britain, more efficient than France, more tolerant than America, more worldly than Norway, more modern than Belgium and more fun than Germany.