Frank van Pamelen: Interwoven
Comedian, writer, poet, grand artist and alumnus Frank van Pamelen reflects on interwoven strands of life
It must have been in my third year. Late 1985 or thereabouts. There was a meeting at the university (back then still called college) and someone from the brand new Textiles Museum was scheduled to speak. As prospects go, it held little allure for us. We knew the members of the band that had been hired for the occasion and there was to be something with beer afterwards. That was all the encouragement we needed. The lecture about wool and looms we just took in stride. And no matter how hard the speaker tried (and he did), with slides, objects, and whatnot, we honestly, if embarrassingly, couldn’t care less.
Students and the city, gown and town: not what one might call a tightly knit community back then. Bars of our own, housing of our own, associations of our own – such a fabric of life was hardly conducive to interacting with the honest citizens of Tilburg. We didn’t concern ourselves with them, nor they with us. Unconnected threads of life, parallel universes. All fine, all good. It wasn’t until I graduated and burst the bubble that is university life that my horizon broadened.
Some three decades have passed and I still call Tilburg home. Where I recently had the pleasure of attending a meeting. Something to do with city marketing. Brainstorming about the city, about our joint destination. I was sitting next to someone from the university and she proved decidedly less unworldly than I had been those many moons ago. She knew the city’s history, its roots, recent developments. And she had a clear vision for the future. As on cue, I found myself thinking back to the speaker of the Textiles Museum and his wool and looms. He, too, had a vision and over de past decades that vision has almost imperceptibly become reality. Forget parallel universes, forget unconnected threads of life; the strands of the fabric of city and university life, of town and gown, are being pulled together ever more closely. To me, it was an emotional moment. Thankfully there was beer after: some things don’t change. Just as well, really.
Date of publication: 7 November 2022