When my wife took over De Jong’s hairdressing business in Harlingen in 1985, it also came with a small, dilapidated house. It was tucked away somewhere at the back, hidden between the surrounding buildings. The address of the house was Kleine Voorstraat 79a and the previous owner had used it as a storage shed. Two years later, in 1987, a few friends and I cleared out the house. We converted the upper floor into a cosy clubhouse where we could have a beer, tell each other tall stories and have a lot of fun. We called the place the ‘Animal House’. Whenever we arranged to meet, it was always at the ‘Animal House’.
 
Later, more people came to have a look and they simply stuck around. They, in turn, brought others along. At one point, there could sometimes be fifteen of us upstairs in that dilapidated little house. Many of the people who came there back then still talk about the ‘Animal House’ today. Everyone had been through something or would start talking complete nonsense after a few beers. A beer cost one guilder in those days. The beer was kept cold in a small fridge. I started keeping track of more and more of the tall stories that were told in the evenings. Halfway through 1988, I began writing them down on my Victor Vicki Desktop PC. With the WordStar program that came with it, I could really let myself go with the characters. Luckily, I had printed everything as well, because at some point WordStar completely seized up and there was nothing more I could do with it: not enough memory. The best and most far-fetched story was the round-the-world trip we wanted to make in a Dutch barge. We could spend entire evenings talking rubbish about it. The more beer we drank, the more fantastic the journey became. I turned this imaginary voyage into several chapters of the book. As this was before the days of the internet, after writing these stories I sent them off to publishers several times. They promptly sent them back unread.
 
And that is how they remained untouched for almost thirty years, until my son asked in May 2018 if he could read them. I immediately picked them up again and partly rewrote the stories so they would fit better with the present day, without losing the atmosphere and characters from the ‘Animal House’ days. Because I had gained experience as the publisher of a magazine in 2011, I started looking for a company that could help me publish the book myself. A year after I had started rewriting it, on Wednesday 8 May 2019, I could finally hold and read my own book after thirty years: ‘Het Animal House - Een humoristisch verhaal’.
 
As far as I was concerned, that was the story told.
 
Until a friend, after reading the book, encouraged me to carry on writing. Especially stories like that round-the-world voyage in the old barge. That was what prompted me not to leave it at just one book. I immediately started work on a second book in October 2019: Een onvoorzien avontuur, in which the adventures could continue beyond the clubhouse where it had all begun. That was how the idea arose to turn the clubhouse name Animal House into the name of a series.
 
The ‘Animal House’ started out as a dilapidated little house hidden between the surrounding buildings, became a clubhouse, then a book, and is now the name of a series.