It's one thing being in a land where nobody totally understood the Amsterdam Treaty referendum but it's another being where nobody has ever heard of it. Just after voting, I went to England and into territory where RTE and the Irish papers don't penetrate. It was days before I knew what had happened. There never seemed to be any mention of it at all on any BBC news bulletin and if I asked other people, they looked at me blankly.
"I think you misunderstood it, dear," said a gentle woman in the hotel, trying to pat me down.
"It wasn't really about Europe at all, it was actually about peace in Northern Ireland and you all mainly voted Yes, which is wonderful."
There were some Japanese tourists in the Cotswold hotel hurrying to pay their bill so they could get to London in time to see their emperor drive to Buckingham Palace. They had planned this visit for two years and it was a wonderful, happy opportunity that they would see Emperor Akihito in the flesh, they said, to polite, embarrassed people who looked away and tried to talk about the weather.
A quartet having the Bank Holiday Outing From Hell in Stow on the Wold was also in the land of misunderstanding. The boy and his girlfriend were about to settle down to a nice pint in a picturesque pub but the boy's mother had another idea. "Why doesn't Dad go get the car and the caravan and we can all have a nice cup of tea indoors. That's the whole point of a caravan," she said, beaming around at those of us unlucky enough not to have the lunchtime drink interrupted by such a deeply unsatisfying alternative.
At Bourton on the Water there's a Model Village, where you can walk around and look down on buildings about the height of your knee. They've planted mini laburnums and lilacs in the little gardens, and made little streams and waterwheels, and it's all both mad and marvellous at the same time. When I came out, I was sitting on a bench reading a brochure about it all and looking at a picture of the man who dreamed it up back in the 1930s. Suddenly, this pleasant-looking, elderly woman crashed down beside me and began a conversation. This in itself is a bit startling in England but what was mind-blowing was that at 12.30 p.m. she was jangling her car keys and was totally smashed - drunk. She was incredibly warm and chatty and told me she knew old Bo or Beau Morris who set it all up - delightful man, she said several times, but wasn't satisfied with the word "delightful" so hunted for another. The way one does. Eventually she found a word. "Bo was a schweeetie," she said and rattled her car keys menacingly, and closed one eye the better to focus on the Ford Mondeo parked beside us. All right - what would you have done? Take her car keys away? Call the police? Say goodbye and run for cover? Decide it was a speech impediment rather than roaring drunkenness? Assume she would sober up fine once behind a wheel?
I played for time.
"Tell me more about Bo," I begged.
"Bo was . . ." she had lost the word again and her face contorted with the pain of trying to find it. My own muddled thinking was that the longer we could keep her here, fighting to find the right phrase, the less chance there would be of her wasting half the Cotswolds in her car.
"Was he delightful?" I asked.
She scowled at me. "He was much more than delightful: that doesn't capture him at all," she said, and rattled the car keys angrily.
At that moment, an entirely sober man of mature years, carrying the weekend's shopping, arrived with a warm smile.
"Ah, you've found a nice friend in the pub, Poppet," he said to the woman. A bit of me wanted to say that actually I wasn't a nice friend from the pub. I was in fact a woman who had been on the verge of taking his wife's car keys and throwing them into a nearby duckpond. But as always, it's better not to say too much and his timing had been masterly.
SO I pretended to be a nice friend from the pub and said I had enjoyed our little chat.
"People do with Poppet," he said, helping her up off the ground where she had sort of slid.
"She has a natural way with people," her husband said proudly as he struggled to get Poppet into the car. But she wouldn't go: there was unfinished business.
"Delightful isn't at all the word," she said to me, eyes like slits now. "He was much more than that; he was . . . he was . . ."
"A sweetie?" I ventured. "A schweetie. That's the word I was looking for. Well done." She was totally happy now and putting up no resistance at being dragged into the passenger seat. Before the door was closed she said to her husband: "Terribly nice woman that. I think she was in love with Bo; she comes and sits here all the time looking at his picture."
She waved at me kindly. "Very, very sad, of course, she said at the top of her voice. "But then you do meet such sad, sad people at places like this, don't you Bunny?"
"Indeed you do, Poppet," said Bunny, fastening her seat belt and presumably driving home to make her lunch for her.