Boogie Nite

11th May
I was a bit late arriving at the village bar on Friday night and walked into a scene straight out of a David Lynch movie, tables of retired army-types played dominoes, a tall, skinny man stood at the end of the room picking out gloomy tunes on a guitar, the Andrews Sisters sang over the speakers.

Brenda hosted the evening, she's seventy and had a lot of surgical enhancement in the days when they used to just pull your face up and tie it behind your ears, heaven knows what her chest is packed with. Her cigarette constantly on the go Brenda has never been known to surface before midday - possibly due to the fact that she is quite tiny and it's probably quite hard to overcome the gravitational pull of pre-war implants.

By the time I got to the bar Brenda, her wig awry, had clearly been on the electric soup. Wearing a long and shiny halter-neck dress, her breasts looked as though two cannon balls had been stuffed to the ends of a pair of tights, she waved a big Tupperware box of cheese straws at me and passed me a Pina Colada that she'd decided was one too many for her.

I had a go at the dominoes but it’s never really been my game and the old buffer opposite was nowhere near as funny as he thought he was. So I let him win quickly and settled on a bar stool for the rest of the evening with Brenda, her stories are relentlessly tragic but delivered with dry wit and the bleakest of black humour, she told me how she’d been in the process of buying a cocktail bar in Marbella but got waylaid by a fleeting affair with a young and muscled rogue who wanted to go to France it was the saddest story in the world - but strangely compelling. If you’ve never watched Coronation Street here’s a clip;

The Food At The Bar Goes La Di Da

16th March
Shane has transformed our scruffy spit-and-sawdust café into a gastrodome, he's bought new white tablecloths and fine glassware, there are pretty candle holders on the tables and he has introduced a wine list. He is quite meticulous and sculpts all the tomatoes and carrots into roses which means that it takes a while for the food to actually make it to the table - but I mustn't be mean, he did serve an impressive meal to the pétanque club this weekend.

The pétanqueuers didn’t quite know what to make of this, they ordered their carafes of House Red as usual, peered suspiciously at the little towers of food on their plates and dipped fingers gingerly into the raspberry sauce that had been trickled around the edges of their plates, but by the end of the evening while Naughty Vera was running the selection process for who would be entertaining her later on, Shane was regaling a happy bunch of chaps with tall tales of how many Spanish prostitutes he could fit into his ski chalet.

Meanwhile on the filming lot...
We love timelapse filming, I’ve already gone on about it here. For spring we're filming flowers opening. This involves setting up stills cameras to take a series of photographs at regular intervals. We've now got beautiful dandelions opening in a nearby field - starting at dawn, the path of the sun is clearly marked by the shadows of the flowers as they open up. Daisies and celandines are really good too. We’ve also blacked out one of the sheds and placed branches of tightly shut blackthorn blossom in sugared water, these are lit constantly, cameras are left pointing at them and clicking away for a week or so until they’ve fully opened.

Tomorrow we rehouse the ants ...

Death In The Afternoon

15th February
I am not sportive and I’m certainly not competitive about anything that requires me to freeze, get sweaty or wear unflattering clothes in public.

While the weather was pleasant I enjoyed the weekly pétanque games at the local bar, I viewed these events as a sort of themed cocktail party. Kitty and I set standards in the hat, eyewear and daft shoe departments, the men talked about lawnmowers and concrete and we all poked fun at each other. The French club members meanwhile made moves to get the club registered so that we could become sérieux. The rest of us joked around and failed to forsee the consequences of all their activity, or at least I did until today when I found Courtney and the club captain on my doorstep and discovered what signing up for a French pétanque club really means:

The first interclub tournament of the season was starting this afternoon, if we didn’t put up a team for the first match, our club would be disgraced. It is cold outside and the interclub boulodrome is distant. No-one had turned up for the rendez-vous at the bar – Courtney felt sorry for the captain and volunteered hers and my services, I tried pleading ill health, lack of interest and incompetence but was battered into submission and found myself climbing into an unroadworthy ashtray of a vehicle that tipped us out, semi-kippered, at the ‘boulodrome’ .

A boulodrome is like a big car park with a shed in the middle. Hundreds of people were milling around, wearing ill-fitting jeans and lurid sweatshirts blazing dayglo slogans declaring allegiance to their club. During the drive we had been lectured on our comportment: it is forbidden to walk around during a match, we must be quiet. We were also warned that there are a lot of rules about clothing, our appearance for this first match would be overlooked but in future we must all be dressed in a team uniform, like the other participants.

Serious pétanque matches involve a lot of heated discussion and the measuring of spaces between boules. It is like being trapped in a statistics conference in a walk-in freezer. We lost every game, by the time I was returned to my house I was so traumatized by the experience that I had developed one of those stupefied Frankenstein Monster walks.

I’ve had a bath and thawed out, but the house is still filled with the odour of pub carpet that is emanating from my coat in the hallway.

Bar Strife

12th February
In order to keep up with any hot insect-related gossip and generally find out who’s who around here, my best networking territory is the village bar, so I have a vested interest in it’s continued existence.

Mr and Mrs Strange (a British couple) took over the bar last summer, the pétanque club got started, supper events happened, it was popular with the French, British and Dutch communities - then Mr Strange needed to disappear.

One day the Strange parents were replaced* by their eldest son Kurt, a goth rocker/death metal fan and his Scandanavian wife, Courtney. This couple have spent the last few months looking as though they had accidentally pressed the wrong buttons on the teleporter.

Mrs Strange recently came back to visit her bar and there was a big shouting match, this resulted in her son buying air tickets back to Denmark, he has not mentioned this to his mother. Courtney asked me to keep quiet about it because they wanted to break the news at an 'appropriate moment’.

The 'appropriate moment’ didn’t happen and Mrs Strange has gone away again. Courtney said that she thinks the news will sound better in an email. She’d like me to stay quiet about their departure because they are hoping that the other, younger, brother will turn up to take over - a minor obstacle being that he doesn’t want to.

I’m useless at secrets and I really don’t want to keep this one. The pétanque club has just become registered to host tournaments at the village bar, the process has taken months, when it was finalised there was huge joy from the players, match dates for the year are now fixed.

*Mrs Strange did tell me about their flit some time before they left. I was sworn to secrecy on pain of death.

A Long Dark Tea Time Of The Soul

3rd February
Mrs Strange came by for coffee - and a rant about her slutty daughter-in-law. I didn't mention the tickets already bought for their return to Denmark but I did ask what will happen if they decide to leave.
That won't happen!
There is so much and nothing to say - luckily my house is too uncomfortable for anyone to want to stay long.

I'm a bit tired of all this and missing The Director. Going back to the UK would be worse, our house there is full of people getting ready for the next session of filming (there will be a machine to knurl metal clamped to the kitchen table and the floor will be scattered with polystyrene peanuts). There will also be people on phones arguing about contracts, scripts and money.

It seemed churlish not to attend the fundraising supper in the village at the weekend, but I hadn't reckoned on Bruno The Knob Destroyer. Bruno's been turning up here with bags of knobbly vegetables a lot lately. I've noticed that his drinking problem is getting worse, his wife has left him again and he smells of wee.

When I got to the hall, a phalanx of big-chested ladies were taking ticket money for the meal. Bruno was waiting at the door and had already bought my ticket, the ladies beamed at me. I gave in and went and sat opposite him on a long table, Bruno attempted to eat soup and focus his watery eyes on me at the same time – it was not a success.

At some point during the meal Mrs Druid got up, stood behind the man seated next to her and started massaging his neck. I find it fascinating what is and isn't tolerated around here, my neighbours believe that Mrs Druid is a member of a (probably) harmless cult, the massage provoked a lot of joking and general ribaldry. Bruno, slowly got up and swayed his way round the table until he was behind me and started stirring his hands around on my head, it was like the pretend hair washing I used to do on my Nan as a child. This had everyone falling about, I managed to convince Bruno that he had achieved miraculous results, even with a very small amount of stirring, he then went round the whole table rubbing everyone’s head a little bit until he found his seat again - He passed out soon after that.

I am The Booby

18th January
The competitive pétanque season will start next month and the club captain is keen that we go forth and win prizes. In order to develop our killer instinct, a tournament was played outside the bar yesterday, with prizes for the winner. Due to lack of talent I played spectacularly badly. My performance was so bad that at the end of the prize-giving ceremony I was presented with a booby prize for being the worst.

The pétanque club are pretty much the last surviving customers of our village bar which is dying a death. The newly married goth couple who are currently running it are fed up and want to go home - they complain that it’s just a village of old people. I’m not sure how they know because they only ever leave their house to get in a car and drive to town – Lord knows I’ve tried to get Courtney to come to yoga with me, when the postlady gets back from maternity leave there’ll be at least one other person under 50 in that class. Neither was Courtney interested in the village charabanc trip to Andorra*, and that was quite a hoot once we’d got everyone who needed lavatories sorted out, then rounded up the ones that had wandered off and got lost during the lavatory chaos.

Kurt has assigned himself the job of chef and lets his wife run the bar. Kurt rarely cooks though, passing his days mostly on the computer while his new wife opens up the bar and sits on her own watching tv downstairs. She’s missing her friends in Denmark and is sad about the marriage. Courtney tells me that she’s not even known her husband for a year yet. He invites his heavily tattooed friends over for poker evenings, the motorbikes parked outside until the early hours tell the villagers all they need to know about the place and Mme Bontette adds speculative layers of salacious gossip.

Kurt is British, his mother and wife (who don’t speak French) both think that Kurt can speak French quite well, but I know that he can’t - which might account for his refusal to be in the bar or write his bar flyers and menus in French. I also know that Kurt’s mother (who owns the place) has decided to come and pay a visit soon to see how they’re getting on.

*Andorra is a duty free principality in the Pyrenees. The French get very excited about going there to buy tax-free butter, I was very excited by the lovely big tin of olives I got for half the price I’d pay in France, that plus the big plastic jerry can of 'Port’ for 5 euros.

January Review

14th January
The Bar and La Salle des Fetes:
The rift widened over new year. The Salle des Fetes advertised a St Silvestre Dinner Disco. Kurt 'n' Courtney hosted an evening of New Year jollity with beer and pies at the bar, the bar posters were in English so it was interpreted by the villagers as being an exclusively British event – which it was.

The Pétanque Club:
still meets up at the bar for a weekly game – the club has now become registered and official, the first inter-club tournament will be played next month, we are summoned to start training in earnest this weekend.

The Cats:
hang out on top of a tall basket full of knobbly ropes in the back kitchen, if I walk in there, they shoot out through the cat hole to the wood shed but Kevin will immediately poke his head back through the hole to see if I’ve got food - he is excessively greedy.

Florence:
my friend is roundly and hugely pregnant. Yesterday we visited some thermal baths and wallowed around like a pair of whales then loafed in the Jacuzzi on the roof where it snowed on us. The big hole in the wall of her house has now got a window in it.

Dormant Creatures:
are now sleeping in a second fridge plugged in just for their use, currently only ants and butterfly cocoons in residence.

The Director:
is still editing last year's material in the UK he is expecting a visit from me next week.

Fancy Dress Bar

16th December
I am entranced by the weekly markets in France, after I've bought food I usually go to the hardware stalls where I buy little plastic briefcases for transporting my eggs, novelty plastic fly swats and jugs. I am intrigued by the bundles of small rectangular carpet pieces, hessian-backed and blanket-stitched around the edges - I guess one places them under the feet while watching TV or eating dinner. From what I can see most French people have ceramic tiles or lino on their downstairs floor - perhaps they’d rather have carpet. I imagine one starts off buying just enough to place a piece under each foot, gradually building up a collection that can be placed, like stepping stones, along popular routes around the house.

Women’s clothes on French market stalls are very particular, lots of strange hybrid things; two or three different styles and fabrics are spliced together resulting in the bastard offspring of, for example, a pin-stripe pencil skirt, a gypsy skirt and a lacy curtain. Last week, at the market with Mme Bontette I succumbed to a very cosy coat/dress (droat?) in two-tone green and black; fleecy on the inside, it has a mandarin collar and zips hem to neck on either side. It’s tunic-like and, worn with black tights and boots, makes me feel that I should be on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

Down at the bar it’s all a bit depressing. The big supper last month must’ve used all their battery power because since then Kurt can’t be bothered to cook very often. He usually sits very close to the big screen watching car racing. The French people have been in a few times since the supper event but as Kurt refuses to take his eyes off the screen and his wife can’t speak French they’ve gone away again. Also Kurts friend Ed has problems with alcohol and frequently needs to make use of the bathroom as a vomitorium and keeps missing whichever receptacle he’s aiming for.

I went there for the weekly pétanque game wearing my new outfit this weekend, Kurt watching telly in a 'Satan Rules' t-shirt, Courtney behind the bar in full bondage gear and Mrs Druid sporting a colourful stripey jumper and rainbow harem pants, Mrs D. took a long look at me and said
What a curious garment

Heffalump Trap Part II

18th November
Early this morning I was washing my hair when I heard loud rapping on the front door. Thinking it might be a delivery I ran to get it and found Old Dad there.
Come early - before midday, I don’t want the postman to know you’re there. We’ll shut your bike in the garage and then I can close the shutters and lock the door and it’ll look as though there’s no one in.
That’s ridiculous
No really if the postman sees you he’ll tell every one
Why would we be worried about that?
Well I don’t want the postman to know
(What are we talking about here?) Well I won’t come then

My hair was dripping and I was caught off-balance. Old Dad just repeated that he’d see me before midday. Then he walked off.

I spent the morning slashing at swathes of thistles and thorns but by noon I was still feeling thoroughly disgruntled. On the way to Old Dad’s house I passed the bar which was open - that stopped me in my tracks. Being a nosey parker I wandered in. A strange young man was sitting at the bar, his hairline has receeded right over the back of his head the remaining strands have been grown long and combed-over. I also think he might have gained weight recently because his clothes don’t meet in the middle. Kurt (up already!) introduced him as 'Ed from Toulouse who has recently moved near the village’.

Last week I put flyers around advertising our upcoming film show at the village hall and the cassoulet supper in the bar afterwards. I learn that the supper is already booked up. The event is this Sunday, I got Kurt talking about cassoulet and it became apparent that he had neither eaten nor made a cassoulet in hs life, I started panicking, then Ed said
I’m from Toulouse I’ll show him how to make a cassoulet

My brain didn’t know what to think then, so I left, and went for lunch, I was late, the postman had been and gone and I insisted we left the shutters open and the door ajar as usual.

I sat down and it was all a bit tense, Old Dad handed me a large tumbler of neat Ricard
Thanks but no, water will be fine – I need to get back to work soon
Glasses of various sorts of alcohol were poured for me over the following long hour, they lined up untouched across my side of the table.

Conversation didn’t flow easily. I resorted to asking him about his upcoming heart operation - he can usually go on about that at length, but today he didn’t seem in the mood to talk about that or his bad leg, or the way he’s a martyr to heartburn.

Finally, as I pushed back my chair and made leaving noises, he said in exasperation
what do women like - how can someone like me give a girl a good time?
I suggested that he pop up the road and ask our lovely neighbour Hélene
Old Dad roared at me
Hélene – she’s nearly 80, what would I be wanting with her?

Kurt's First Supper

9th November
I went down to the bar for a game of pétanque yesterday. My fellow pétanquers are stunned by the sudden, unannounced disappearance of the senior Stranges. Their replacement by Goth Rockers feels like we’re suddenly extras in a remake of Village of the Damned as directed by John Waters .

Courtney opens up the bar at some point in the afternoon. Wearing a black satin mini-kimono (= instant forgiveness by lingering male population for missing lunchtime) she clears up the remains of the previous night’s party looking a little hungover.

Kurt gets up a bit later, he has announced himself as the new chef and we’re all curious to see what his food’s like. The Director put down his computer to join us for the after-pétanque supper at the bar. The man had made a big effort and it really wasn’t bad at all. After supper we all said it was great, he unscowled and became really rather friendly.

New Blood At The Bar

2nd November
The filming really is done for this year, the Camera Boys have returned to the UK - we are now in visiting season. Since Bruno's August visit we have been without doorhandles - he replaced the original knobs with a set that can’t be made to stay fixed on. My parents arrived here a few days ago. They have known me long enough not to expect much in the way of comfort but I bet they had hoped for door handles. No matter - once given a pair of pliers and a monkey wrench they soon got the hang of getting in and out of their bedroom. My mother hasn’t really got the upper body strength to haul the front door open on her own yet though.

We were also suffering from a smelly drain problem. Our squalid kitchen has a concrete sink with a hole through the back wall. The water, and whatever else you put in the sink, washes through to a concrete gutter running the length of the back of the house. Over the years it has silted up and grown over with weeds, the autumn rains have made the area behind the kitchen swampy and putrid. My repeated calls to Landlord and plumber have been ignored. Mum put her foot down, The Director and my father got out the shovels and a wheelbarrow, dislodging unspeakable hideousness to make a drainage channel.

As a further treat for my parents I took them to the bar for some of Mrs Strange’s gin. The Senior Strange’s have already slipped away. But Kurt the tattooed son has returned from Copenhagen with his wife and turns out to be perfectly good at serving gin with flat tonic in a dirty glass from the iceless bar.

Kurt’s wife, Courtney has translucently pale skin, she has only recently started her tattoo collection, they both dress exclusively in black. They tell me that their band had split anyway and that they are going to liven up the bar with 'live bands, gourmet food and that kind of stuff'. Courtney is animated, she says that Kurt’s great in the kitchen - I’m not sure if she means he can cook. Buoyed up with enthusiasm for their plans (and feeling guilty that I’ve now booked to show our film at the village hall) I suggest that they put on a supper for after the film show - I’ll publicise it on the flyer I’m going to put around the surrounding villages next week. Kurt is a sullen kind of chap, he asks what sort of thing I have in mind,
I suggest casserole-type dishes; a daube, coq au vin … a cassoulet?
I’ll do a cassoulet
Something about his response is not putting me at ease.

Discombobulation

7th October
Today, instead of snoozing though interminable alarm calls, something possessed me to leap out of bed, and go straight off for an early morning walk (OK I dressed first). Mist rising off the rolling hills – very poetic. I stopped in with M and Mme Bert for coffee on my way back. M. Bert is the twinkly man who first showed me the Lovely House he has an impeccable potager, and is an archetypal French Paysan, bright blue trousers, dark wrinkly skin, always in a hat. Mme Bert is tiny and has bright blue eyes that she uses to gaze in admiration at her husband the expert shot, collector of mushrooms and gardener extraordinaire. She follows conversations mouthing along with the talker, which is disconcerting. She tells me to check my walnuts.

There are great numbers of crayfish in the lake, of various sorts but dominated by a very invasive species; the Signal Crayfish which they are keen to eradicate in France. I’m doing my bit for the cause – these days the crayfish are busy having sex at the edges of the lake. I put on a rubber glove, creep up behind them and put them in a bucket.

I accumulated masses of live crayfish, so I delivered a bowlful to Mme Bontette, the French lady tells me at length about the court bouillon she will make to cook them in and all the rest of her planned evening menu. I then took a bowlful to Mrs Strange from the bar, she has just been round to return the empty bowl. She told me that she couldn’t be bothered with them and just dumped them out (still live) in the stream at the bottom of her garden.

I went to check the walnuts, their skins are splitting, I picked a few and took them round to the Berts to see if they are ready enough. M. Bert tells me to take off the skins and leave them in the open for three days. My fingers are like prunes from wearing rubber gloves to catch crayfish so I do the walnut job bare-fingered. I now look as though I have a very heavy smoking habit.

For our supper I made a bowl of aioli, salad and steamed potatoes to eat with our crayfish.

The landlord phoned this evening to say that he’s coming by next weekend (he lives a four-hour drive away) and would like to see us. Having fallen in love with this place and anyway dreading the day when we will have to go, I am now convinced that he has decided to sell the property soon and is coming to ask us to leave. An hour after the call The Director is already tired of the sound of my gnashing teeth.

I Get a Proper Job at Last

5th October
I went along to the bar to join the Saturday afternoon boule game which was unusually busy and found Mrs Strange in a flap about supper, she was booked out and shorthanded, I said I’d waitress that evening if she wanted.

The pétanque players are mainly retired people, the expats come with their spouses and the elderly Frenchmen come in their slippers and bring family members who are visiting for the weekend. There are a few single people; local men whose dental state and dress sense are possibly factors in perpetuating their single status. And there is Vera, a bubbly, flirty Dutch woman who likes to be the centre of attention, she has not spoken to me before, but today she fizzed up to me and demanded.
Who are you, do you have a husband – where is he???
I pointed out that it would be foolish to bring a husband along, given the man-hunting opportunities for me here.
Well don’t you hunt my man she warned me, turning on her heel.
I am intrigued – which one?

There were no clues that evening either as Vera sat with a group of women, the 'eligible’ men were all getting red and sweaty on their own table which I supplied with large of amounts of Ricard then large amounts of red wine then large amounts of beer containing shots of peach- or mint-flavoured syrup.

Have got Wednesdays hairdresser glue out of my hair which is now in plaits, I'm totally channelling those stein-carrying maidens you see at German beer fests

Tart Rejection

17th September
It’s gone all quiet here, The Director and the Happy Camera Boy are back in the undergrowth with the insects and suddenly I’ve got time to catch up on village life.

I had a big cook up and ended up with a surplus tart on my hands, I decided to take it over to Bruno the Knob Destroyer who is still leaving bags of vegetables on our gate. He intercepted me as I was heading up his drive;
What are you doing?
Bringing you one of my tarts – it’s a thank you for all the tomatoes
Well don’t, my wife will get suspicious – go away

I offloaded my tart on nice M Bert across the road and pedaled on to the bar to join in with the pétanque, the club is now a busy, international affair (by village standards). The Strange parents are running the bar double-handedly now that they have been abandoned by their children, their eldest son married his Danish bride and they've gone off to join a thrash metal band in Copenhagen. The other son has also disappeared, possibly to stock up on military outfits and stiff leather boots.

National angst

19 August
The flood of Northern Europeans, particularly the Dutch and British, into France is a well-documented phenomenon. France has every kind of beautiful landscape, great weather, good food and above all space. Us Northerners who are fed up with being cramped, cold and damp are pouring into this country in our millions.

The French are worried about the dilution of their culture and lots of other issues.They don’t want the damp, decrepit old properties that the Northerners love. But they do love the price foreigners are willing to pay for these 'money pits’, they take the money and run off to buy a new build on the edge of a town then complain that their young people can no longer afford to live in the country. Any French person I meet who's wanting to sell a house will ask me if I know an English person who'd like to buy it.

The Dutch seem to be completely at ease on the issue, but the English are full of angst, loudly declaiming against the bad sort of English who are just here on an endless cocktail party behaving badly with their compatriots in bars and refusing to speak French (I have not yet found this particular party - must get better contacts).

This tension can become especially hilarious at the local café. Rural bars are closing all over France, mainly because of drink-driving law enforcement but also because a lot of French people consider it 'inappropriate’ for women to drink. Older French women are very conscious of this, but they don’t like their men going out drinking without them - unless there’s footie on the telly and they’d rather have them out of the house watching it.

So our bar is mainly patronised by foreigners. The Strange Family who run the bar really don’t like the English. They tell me they would like more French customers, I think that if they put on the sort of things French people like to do: Belote (card) evenings, Lotto, Food French people might come. I also think they'd get more local custom if they wrote their advertising flyers and bar notices in French rather than English.

Garden Envy

13th Aug
I have become afflicted with garden envy. Not for the leisure sort of garden with grass and flowers because most examples of that in the area are rubbish. I want a potager like my neighbours have. Great lush ranks of artichokes, beans, courgettes and potatoes flourishing next to high, burgeoning tresses of tomatoes. Bright lettucey things in neat rows and big bushy herbs lining the paths. The potager at the Lovely House has not been looked after for many years and is full of nettles and brambles. Digger Man tearing it up to fill a hole in the dam earlier didn't really help either. I've repaired the worst of the damage, cleared the weeds and started a compost heap, but apparently we're supposed to be making a film, so I’ve had to be content with gazing longingly over Mr Bert's hedge on my way to the phone box to call France Telecom (sigh, still no landline), watching him pick leaves off things and tie-up stuff.

I'm still picking mystery vegetable packages off the gate, Mr Bert claims no knowledge of who it might be.

If I go in the other direction towards the bar there are other gardens but I have to stand on my bicycle pedals to see them over the hedges as I wheel past. Arriving at the bar today people are playing pétanque outside, Mrs Strange is behind the bar, she tells me that some Dutch people have set up a pétanque club.

The bar reopens

5th August
The local bar has recently reopened after a long period of being closed. A British family have taken it over. I find their decision to open a bar, given their open hostility towards most of their fellow humans, strange – have they come to punish us? Mother and father both dislike the English, They have a Goth/rock'n'roll son with a lot of tattoos and a neo-Nazi/closet-homosexual son who hates women, foreigners and middle-aged people. The Goth will marry his Danish fiancée here in the village later this month. He tells me that if they got married in Denmark all their friends would come wanting a free meal.