| It
was confused faces all round this week when visitors from Grapevine,
Texas came to Scotland looking for the "town" of West Lothian.
The visitors, er, are visiting, to celebrate the twinning of their
town which is real with streets and houses and everything with "West
Lothian" which is not actually a town, but rather an administrative
term delineating a local authority area.
Sporting
a ten gallon hat probably, the leader of the Grapevine delegation
confessed himself puzzled: "Usually twinning arrangements are
agreed between towns, but there doesn't seem to be a town of West
Lothian as such. Hot diggety dawg!" Or words to that effect.
While
the visitors will enjoy being shown round the many attractions of
West Lothian - mainly the road signs directing you out of West Lothian,
there will be no visit to "West Lothian" itself as it
doesn't exist.
While
sticklers for detail might object that this must confuse the fuck
out of anyone with half a brain or indeed Texans, a spokesperson
for the West Lothian Council, which does exist, probably, doesn't
see any problem:
"We
did originally consider seeking a twinning arrangement between that
monument to breeze block that is Livingston, and Grapevine, but
the former already enjoys a suicide pact with Gdansk, so instead
we've just gone for a vague, amorphous twinning sort of thing between
Grapevine and the general area. I don't think anyone noticed to
be honest."
It
is thought that this brave departure from bourgeois notions of category
rules will spark a wave of twinning arrangements that aren't actually
between anything in particular.
Thus, Bathgate will twin with The Grand Canyon, Almondvale will
twin with New Jersey and West Calder will twin with anything really,
it doesn't matter, because, at the end of the day, it's all good
isn't it?
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The
proud town of Grapevine, Texas
|
Ah yes,
the tree-lined avenues, the neo-classical flourishes that embody
the spirit of downtown
West Lothian, or would, if such a place actually existed
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