Theo van Gogh was no angel, though he looked a little like one: a plump cherub gone to seed, with a mop of golden hair and piggy little eyes of a blue as intense as his great-granduncle's. He was a peculiarly Dutch figure, one you could recognise in any painting by the 17th-century Dutch Masters: gross, well-fed, independent, insolent, sitting in a tavern drinking a tankard of beer, with his armour loosened.
For more than a decade from 1985 he was my neighbour in Amsterdam. He was a familiar figure on the streets and canals, cycling furiously along with his young son on the back, on the way to school. His son attended the same proudly humanist primary school as my daughter, and we would occasionally chat at the sandbox as we waited for our offspring - mainly about film projects we were trying to get off the ground and the machinations of the Dutch film board and TV networks. In those days, he was better known as a film-maker than as a controversialist.
Amsterdam in those decades was a famously tolerant city whose motto was "Alles kan, niks hoeft": everything is allowed, nothing is obligatory. This was the reason that many foreigners such as myself, and many Dutch people from the provinces, such as Theo, wanted to live there. In a sense, like New Yorkers before September 11th, we were living in a bubble, blissfully unaware that not everywhere was like Amsterdam. Or rather, that not all Amsterdam consisted of the 60,000 white yuppies living inside the magic circle of canals.
Even here, though, Van Gogh managed to push the outside of the envelope. When it came to outrageous, obscene and scurrilous abuse, he had no equal. He lambasted everyone who offended his sense of scorn, from politically correct social democrats to actors with opinions. He was dogged by allegations of anti-Semitism - the only really socially unacceptable transgression in the Amsterdam of the time. In retrospect, those were innocent days.
As a journalist, he had no Irish equivalent. The highly personal, usually sexually tinged and proudly tasteless abuse he meted out to politicians would have landed him in court in Ireland; and even in Holland it tested the limits of free speech. In addition, there was never any danger of mistaking Theo for a respectable member of society. He had, at one time or another, been fired from practically every newspaper, magazine or TV station in Holland.
His polemics were mainly directed at a cosy sense of tolerance which drove him to distraction. Holland in the 1980s and 1990s had become a strangely immobile society. The liberal, social democratic consensus which had been painfully constructed over a period of a hundred years held sway, giving rise to the so-called "polder model", a notion which was designed to remove controversy from the political sphere. Governance would proceed on the basis of agreement, consensus, discussion and compromise. This was fine, except it tended to mean that controversial subjects such immigration, racism and the explosive growth of Islam among the Dutch population were simply ignored, because they might lead to conflict.
Eventually, they did explode, in the bizarre figure of Pim Fortuyn, the gay anti-immigrant populist. When he was murdered in 2002, I can bear witness that, among the Amsterdam elite, few tears were shed for him. There was even a feeling that this was a shameful chapter in Dutch recent history which could now be closed.
But the signs of what was to come had long been evident. In 1990, I was involved in a curious incident. My daughter had meningitis and was rushed to the nearest hospital in Amsterdam East, a mainly immigrant neighbourhood. This was the time of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. One day, as my wife was sitting at our daughter's bedside reading Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, An agitated nurse asked her to put the book away as most of the patients and their families were Moroccans and might be offended.
My wife was outraged and called the head doctor. When he heard what had happened he upbraided the nurse in harsh terms. I can still picture him stalking off down the corridor in his white coat, shouting back over his shoulder: "This is still Amsterdam, you know."
Fourteen years later, on November 2nd, 2004 - two years ago last Thursday - Theo van Gogh would be pulled from his bike 200 yards from the entrance to that hospital and butchered in broad daylight for having blasphemed against Islam. He was 47. An Amsterdam-born radical Islamist, Mohammed Bouyeri, is serving a life sentence for the murder.
In 2002 I had been approached to work with Van Gogh, writing an English-language remake of one of his more controversial films. After a few expensive lunches the project petered out, as such things often do, when the financier decided to put his money instead into a Scottish grouse-shooting estate. But I found Theo to be far from the berserker of popular legend. He was courteous, easy to work with, and desperate to make films.
He went on to make a film about Pim Fortuyn; and later he made the short, arty film Submission, based on a script by the controversial Dutch anti-Islam campaigner Ayaan Hirshi Ali. It was not a work in any way typical of his oeuvre, except in its deliberate provocation - notably the use of lines from the Koran superimposed on the abused body of a woman.
Theo had told his collaborator that he was in no danger compared with her: "I'm the village idiot," he said, "and you're the fallen woman." But unlike her, the village idiot did not have round-the-clock police bodyguards.