L'Union Européene Dérange St Neots Nouveau
The EU has today announced, that under ruling 2008/604/EU, all twinned towns must translate road names into the local languages of towns they are twinned with. As St Neots is twinned with Faches Thumesnil all roads must be signposted in French as well as English.
This will come as a blow to residents of St Neots, who have recently had to content with other madcap EU rulings on subjects such as the name of the Market Square, and dealt with subsidy confusion over roundabouts.
“How ridiculous,” council spokesman Dean Dexter said today. “The number of people who speak French in St Neots is miniscule, and pretty much the only French visitors we ever get are Faches Thumesnil town council, over on a jolly. I mean, fact-finding trip.”
St Neots’ saving grace is that it is only twinned with one town. Huntingdon will have to translate every road name into not only French, but Italian and Hungarian.
“There’s the matter of how far we go with the translation too,” said Dexter. “Is it just the ‘road’ or ‘street’ bit, or do we have to find out what the name means?” To help in this task the council have ordered a French dictionary from Amazon.co.uk. “Used of course,” said Dexter, “we can’t justify spending £8.99 of taxpayers’ money on a new one.”
The other option is to end twinning association with Faches Thumesnil, but the council are thought to be reluctant to do this as it would end their free holidays, or “fact-finding missions” as they term them. The council were said to be loooking into twinning alternatives in English-speaking countries though – Sydney is currently looking like the favourite.
Un Petit Clic!