Community dancing at Wessex Folk Festival 2008, Weymouth, Dorset
Networking through twinning cropped up recently for me when I was chatting by email to the English owner of a small French bar in France and Jen (the landlady) mentioned she was very keen to make some twinning arrangements between her local village and other villages or towns, perhaps in England.
The name of her bar is l’Homme Vert after the Green Man of mythology, which is often seen as a symbol of rebirth and embodying the cycle of growth and renaissance of each new spring.
It occurred to me that folk mythology has long been a way of bringing people together to achieve human networking and that a good bar or pub can also be a powerful force to network a community together.
In an age when around a third of British people live alone and spend much of their time watching television, I suspect we need to spend a lot more time finding ways to get out and meet our neighbours.
In a world where mass communication enables us to interact with people on the other side of the world as if they were next door, it is perhaps advisable that we make sure our neighbours are also our good friends.
So, if there are any English villages, Welsh villages, Scottish villages or Irish villages who have aspirations for twinning and think they would like to twin with a small village in the North West of France called St Pierre Sur Orthe, why not contact Jen at l’Homme Vert, Rue Msgr Grandin, St Pierre Sur Orthe, Mayenne, Pays De La Loire, France.
Bye for now
Rob