Our orange tent had tricked me with false sunrise. I shivered as mist lapped at my legs. It was too early for the clank and splash at the communal tap, the scent and sizzle of bacon. Dad, who’d woken when I crawled over him to unzip the morning, whispered ‘Shall we explore?’ My plaits bounced excitedly as I nodded. This was day five of ‘life in a foreign country’ and there was still so much to see. Admittedly, the border was a mere seventy miles north of our home in County Durham, but they had different pound notes and a blue-and-white flag, and people who sounded their ‘r’s as if rolling them across pebbled paths...........more

Peering at the menu behind the counter, I worry for a moment that I’ve succumbed to sudden onset macular degeneration. I struggle to read the offerings: h cks, he e nd om t toa ti

Then I realise it’s a peg board where items are composed of individual plastic letters and several have fallen off. The café’s interior décor – red Formica tables and wood veneer walls, suggests it was last updated circa 1960. Strung across the ceiling are faded Christmas paperchains (it’s September) that pre-date Slade, possibly even Bing...........more

A skinny figure in an orange vest and straw trilby hurries towards me, hand outstretched.

‘Lenny’s my name, guiding’s my game. English? What’s your team? Mine’s Liverpool. ‘Scuse me a minute.’ He gabbles into his mobile, hunching his shoulder to hold it in the crook of his neck while high-fiving a passing posse of teenage boys. An elderly mama trundles a pram piled with fruit along the bank of the sluggish, jackal-yellow river. She tosses Lenny a mango which he fields with a flourish, the scent of the ripe flesh briefly competing with his aftershave..........more

A fuzzy aura surrounds Baby Jesus: not so much halo, more white angora. He and Joseph have been knitted from assorted scraps of 3-ply and are roughly twice the size of Mary, a Barbie-like figure swathed in silver tinsel. All three, however, are dwarfed by the bizarre centrepiece of this Nativity, a plastic pig carcass, suspended from a frame, belly slit open, innards picked out in sickly shades of grey and purple. .........more