‘TWINNING’ wasn’t something I did as a kid. Unless you count moving to Wales.

But I’m not sure that building a massive council estate on a quaint old Anglesey fishing village, filling it with the advance legions of the English working class and then fighting running battles with the displaced Welsh counts.

Even my attempt to replicate 300 Spartans - no, not the Lycra shorts - by developing a shield wall to prevent the hail of building site debris being hoyed at us, didn’t really work. Well, cardboard isn’t really a defensive shield material to be honest.

So, twinning became something I got involved in later in life.

This is the idea designed to bring nations closer together where you send your youth to another country then welcome their youth back here.

The aim is to see how they live in another part of the world. It’s all about sharing experiences and learning from one another. No one's ‘better’ but we’re all ‘different’. Yet the same.

What I do now grew out of the twinning. People don’t really do twinning anymore, what with the internet, cheap travel.

And ‘home hosting’ really died a death after the introduction of DBS checks made staying at a stranger's house a less reliable prospect.

You may know the family, but what happens when dodgy uncle Frank turns up…

So last week I drove Americans around to see our country. I took them on a canal boat. It rained. Top notch British experience there.

I took them to Whitby for fish and chips. They fed them to the seagulls. And then were attacked by the seagulls. And I took them to Anglesey to see the island. But before they could say Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, they’d seen it.

But the most important experience of their visit was the days in the Cotswolds.

It is, of course, lovely there with stately homes, grand houses, clean streets you could eat your kombucha honey off, twee thatched cottages and one solitary homeless person selling the ‘Big Issue’. But he’d hitched there from Birmingham.

And I thought to myself ‘never mind twinning with Germany or France, we should be sending our inner-city kids here, to see how the other half live here in our own country!’.

When I started the Czech twinning after their Velvet Revolution, they all thought we’d have big houses here. Some did, most didn’t. Like back home. And they thought we were all rich. Some were, most weren’t. Like back home.

Mind you, ‘Twinning’ has moved on and the world's a lot smaller.

I know what they’re doing in Uherske Hradiste, but I wonder what they’re up to in Little Twottling on the Mold…….