Extract from my 2015 diary:
“We invited Nico's mate, Martijn, to stay on the boat for a few days. Martijn is a friend from Nico's “troublesome” teenage years, who he’d lost contact with ten years ago, but who he has recently managed to find again through the wonders of Facebook.
I've never met the guy but always hear stories about their times together: "Martijn this..." and "Martijn that..." and "When Martijn and I...", so as you can imagine I was pretty intrigued to meet this guy!
He has a small campervan with his girlfriend, Leonie, and they were travelling in the area anyway so we thought why not invite them over to stay, so we can have a good old catch-up.
He's a really nice guy, speaks excellent English (as does his lovely girl.f.), and (maybe unfortunately) has Nico's exact style of humour! So now I have to put up with two of them!
He's a lot bigger than I was expecting, really tall and muscular, and has some big tattoos, but he seems fairly harmless, so at least I don't feel threatened when I laugh at him for getting stuck in our tiny boat doorways!
We spent the evening living it up like millionaires on the back of the boat and it was really nice to be able to finally put a face to the name. For years I’d heard Nico tell stories about this mysterious Martijn, and I never actually believed he existed, but turns out he’s just the nicest bloke.”
RIP Martijn The Great, you will be sorely missed.