Every year somebody asks which boat we are on, and every year the answer is that we are not on a boat. We have never done a boat on Koningsdag. We have never done one for Pride either. From the outside the day looks like a floating car boot sale, and there is a version of it that is precisely that, but it is not the version I have arrived at after a few years of living here.
What we actually do
Drinks first, either at ours or at a friend’s place. That is the whole trick, and it sounds unambitious, and it is the single best decision available to anybody on this particular day. The alternative is walking into the middle of it cold, sober and with no access to a bathroom, which is not a plan so much as a dare.
This year we were at a friend’s flat looking out over Rokin and Dam Square, which is about as good a seat as this city has to offer. You can watch the entire thing arrive. Trains empty out at Centraal and the crowd comes down towards the middle in a steady orange stream that simply does not stop for hours. It is genuinely impressive from three floors up and genuinely unbearable from inside it, and the difference between those two experiences comes down entirely to where you decided to be standing at eleven in the morning.
Then bars, late, with friends. That is the shape of it now.
The visitor effect
We also had a friend in town for his first Koningsdag, which does something useful to a day you think you have taken the measure of. You find yourself explaining things you had stopped seeing. Why the whole city is selling its unwanted possessions off a blanket on the pavement. Why the children with the recorders are the real economy. Why nobody is in charge of any of it and it still works. It put some of the spectacle back.
The orange question
Fully committed, and escalating. This year I had matching hoodies made for the two of us, orange with royal blue text and team numbers printed on the back, which was cute in a way I do not intend to defend to anybody.
The important word there is hoodies. I have had shirts printed for this day before and the weather has made a fool of me every single time. Late April here is not a season, it is a shortlist. You get the sunny version, the horizontal rain version, and the one that manages both before lunch. A printed shirt commits you to optimism at eight in the morning, and by two you are wearing somebody’s borrowed coat over the joke nobody can now read. Hoodies. Learn from me.
The year it did not happen
In 2020 it was cancelled, and on the day itself I posted a photograph from the year before instead. What strikes me looking back at it is the caption. I had written that in the picture I was worrying about my outfit, because I was going outside. That was the gag in April 2020, and it was not entirely a gag.
It did tell me something about the real thing, though. A day that appears to be about a monarch, a colour and an enormous amount of drinking turns out, when you take it away, to have been about the fact that everybody is outdoors at the same time on purpose. That is the whole load-bearing element. Everything else is decoration, and I say that as a man in a custom hoodie.
Still my favourite of the Dutch holidays, which I say in the full knowledge that the weather has an equal vote and exercises it freely.
