Thame Delegation Cycles To Twin Town, Arrives In Wrong Country, Declares It "Twinned Now Anyway"
A nine-strong civic party from Thame, led by the Chair of the Amenities and Bunting Board and his deputy, left at dawn on Wednesday on bicycles bound for the twin town of Saint-Pelage-sur-Ouche. They arrived on Friday evening in a retail park outside Ghent, where they cut a ribbon, exchanged commemorative tankards with a bewildered tyre fitter, and declared the two settlements "twinned with immediate effect, backdated forty years."
The ride marks the Ruby Jubilee of the original twinning, an arrangement signed in 1986 by two men who, according to the Archive of Municipal Handshakes, had never met, shared no language, and agreed the whole thing by nodding at each other across a ferry lounge.
"We were never lost," the Deputy Chair told the Herald from a folding chair he had strapped to his handlebars for precisely this reason. "Navigation is a mindset. If you arrive somewhere and there is a mayor-adjacent figure willing to accept a tankard, then by the letter of civic protocol you have arrived at your twin town. I would go further. I would say the twin town came to us."
The Institute for Municipal Distance, an independent three-person body based in a converted stable near Long Crendon and staffed by a retired cartographer, his sister, and a man who owns a laminator, has calculated that 31 per cent of all British twinning journeys end in a town that is not the intended town. Asked how the figure was reached, the Institute's director said the sample was "the two I can remember" and that the percentage "feels correct in the body, which is where the real statistics live."
Matters escalated on Saturday when the delegation, warmed by the tyre fitter's hospitality, voted unanimously to twin with him personally. A deed was drawn up on the back of a road closure notice and signed in biro. Under its terms Thame is now twinned with a town, a retail park, one individual and, owing to a drafting error, the concept of Wednesday.
The original twin town has not responded to requests for comment, though the Herald understands a Saint-Pelage-sur-Ouche delegation set off in the opposite direction the same morning and is currently somewhere near Rugby, holding a small ceremony of its own.
The Chair intends to make an annual event of it. "Next year we go again, and next year we will be even less certain where we are going, because certainty is the enemy of friendship. Someone asked me at the roadside whether I could point to our twin town on a map. I am honouring that question by printing it in full and refusing to answer it."