Re: ... Sadly twinned with both Reading and Basildon
The sadly twinned line stood out to me a joke I am clearly missing, would anyone care to enlighten an international reader who does not get the reference?
'Twinning' is a cozy little scam that local government councillors across Europe have run for a number of years - pick a town elsewhere in the world, establish diplomatic relations with your civic government counterparts over there, and your communities will be Best Friends Forever. In theory it allows communities of similar size/challenges to learn from each other and establish entente cordiale; in practice it just means taxpayer-subsidized holidays^H^Hjunkets^H^Hfact-finding "friendship" visits for the aforementioned bigwigs for ever more.
Generally the towns with which UK places are twinned tend to be rather pleasant, so the Mayor and his/her cronies have to force themselves to suffer a visit to, say, Nice or Geneva - but the trendier municipal authorities have a compulsion to twin with benighted hell-holes that bear no relation to their own community (e.g. "Marlborough, twinned with Gunjur in the Gambia".)
As the article points out, sometimes that cuts the other way, and the foreign town draws the short straw out of misguided sympathy or just bad luck. I'm sure the French town hoped to be twinned with somewhere nice - but had to settle for Basildon and Reading. Perhaps next year they'll get an upgraded twinning arrangement with Mogadishu or maybe even Detroit.