Villiers-le-Bel? We brought back a couple of bottles of that from Calais didn't we?

Foreign languages, lots of them, I love it. There's something about seeing all the letters jumbled around in wild new conjunctions, all the differences, similarities, apparent and misleading. Half the fun of being abroad is not having a clue what's going on, then thinking that you're picking it up, but finding you were a bit or a lot wrong...

Not calling other places by their right name, why do we do that? Sometimes it makes the place-name easier to pronounce, but often not. In English the decision seems as much based on what the French call it as anything. Cologne is hardly a word likely to naturally occur in our language, yet we use it rather than Köln. Perhaps it belonged to the French once? Ditto Bruges, which almost everyone lives there knows as Brugge, but we persist with the Francophonic. Perhaps it too belonged to the French once? They seem very careless with their cities.

While we're in that region, I should pause for a moment to congratulate Belgium on having given up on government. They've been without one for nearly six months now and provide an example to us all that one can manage without.

Switzerland is littered with them, places squarely in the German speaking region which we in England cannot imagine as anything other than of Gallic stock. Luzerne become Lucerne, Bern gets an extra e on the end, and we commit the unforced error of calling Basel 'Basle' and silencing the s - because we're au fait with that pronounciation, y'know - despite the French calling it Bâle. Why? Who are we trying to impress?

Worse is when they do it themselves. The amount of nonsense graffiti I've seen on Northern European bus shelters using English words - which far from being hip just look like those little self-help phrases one sees stuck to the desk partitions of the unfortunate.

See also football, that sport that looks back to its mother country, undeterred by the homeland's intermittent failure to qualify for international competitions. Consider FC København, so irretrieveably middle class that they make Brøndby look like Milwall. Several years ago I happened to be in the Trianglen district when they were at home to Lazio and it was deeply embarrassing: 'Everywhere we go / people wanna know / who we are / and were do we come from / we are København / we come from Copenhagen...' all in perfect Engelsk. Makes one nostalgic for the Vikings.

And Rotterdam's Feyenoord, who have made the Feijenoord post-industrial district in which they reside more phonetically available to the easily confused English tongue. "Zowel Stadion Feijenoord als Feyenoord Rotterdam met een lange ij geschreven werd. Pas in 1974 besloot de voetbalclub een y te gebruiken, de lange ij gaf namelijk problemen met de uitspraak in het buitenland." It's like having your food cut up for you as for an invalid.

The Dutch have a natural sensitivity to hearing their language mangled - see how relaxed they are about our mispronunciations of 'van Gogh' "Van Goff, fine! Van Go, if you like!" Anything but hear us attempt the blend of strangulated respiration and expectoration required to emit the correct sound. Not until one of the kunstenaar's descendants got assassinated did we get to hear the real sound of it. See also what we call The Hague, which to them is Den Haag because even they can't be bothered to enunciate 's Gravenhage.

And while I couldn't hope to be able to pronounce 'Scheveningen' with any hope of being understood by Nederlanders, for their part they'll never be able to say 'squirrel'.