I do between 75 and 100 concerts a year and earn twice as much as I did as a nurse
I started whistling when I was about four years old. We lived in the Eindhoven area of the Netherlands, and my dad whistled all the time. It was impossible for him to whistle out of tune. He whistled a lot of Bach, but also the Beatles. We whistled TV theme tunes together – him whistling one note, and me the next. I immediately produced a nice tone. Within a few years, I was better than he was.
By 2003, when I was 34, I was working as a psychiatric nurse, and had three young kids. That year we had a big
Christmas dinner for the family, and I remember whistling along to cheesy tunes like Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer. My sister-in-law asked me to stop several times. At one point, I said: “If there was a competition, I would enter.” Two weeks later, I received a text from her: “Geert, you’re going to America. I’ve just entered you for the World Whistling Championships.”