First Albergen (municipality of Tubbergen, Overijssel) received an asylum seekers’ center without being asked, then the media came and finally the rest of the country received a lot of Albergen, municipality of Tubbergen, mayor Wilmien Haverkamp (a name that I have given up because of the song ‘Vrouw Haverkamp’ from the band Normal probably wrongly link to the Achterhoek, a completely different area in another province. I looked up that song: how does the young Bennie Jolink resemble the old Erik Dijkstra, or vice versa. And how much has changed because it’s with the fuss around the breast cover of Linda in the back of my mind it is no longer imaginable that a whole party tent is blaring along with phrases such as ‘ Vrouw Haverkamp, what big tits you have, although in Albergen perhaps because, if I may believe the reports, it is still about Easter fires , funfair, carnival and marquee.)
And alderman Ursula Bekhuis-Groothuis (Municipality Interests/VVD, who attended Wednesday evening) On 1 in her latest dress was expressing the indignation of the municipality of Tubbergen. She was helped by perhaps the best-known local resident of Albergen: Hennie de Haan. Last year she was nominated for the Woman in the Media Award Overijssel for her work as chairman of the Dutch Union of Poultry Farmers, but she did not win. Hennie feared it was famous noabership – the ‘looking at each other’, which residents of some parts from the east and north of the country are only too happy to pull out to indicate the sympathetic character of their region – would be jeopardized if all the rooms of the Landhotel ‘t Elshuys purchased by COA will soon be full of asylum seekers.
The fear of the residents of Albergen and Tubbergen was widely reported in reports in all newspapers. De Volkskrant had traveled with two pieces and came back with an article in which farmer’s son Bart Klaassen and “Almelo, Alfred Haarhuis, dressed in Bermuda”, let the lower abdomen drain, NRC chose the perspective of a Syrian family that had been staying in Albergen for a long time, but was evacuated from the hotel at the end of the story by Vluchtelingenwerk, just to be safe. Signs with texts such as ‘Keep Albergen clean’ had been hung at ‘t Elshuys.
It added up so much that I am now on my Albergen/Tubbergen municipality tax. I’ll read the reconstructions at Christmas, maybe by that time some ordinary people will have been found in Albergen and the surrounding area, but the chance of that is small.
Marcel van Roosmalen writes an exchange column with Ellen Deckwitz here.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of August 19, 2022