‘Will they get on the bus or do we get out at the border?’

‘What border’s that?’

‘The international border.’

‘It’s Wales, Jess.’

‘I thought it was a different country.’

‘Well, it is…sort of.’

‘So?’

‘So, it’s not the type of country anyone would go to the trouble of applying for a visa to get into.’

‘What about drug smuggling – weapons?’

‘I think they’ve got enough already.’

We were on the local bus from Hereford to Hay – a journey fraught with disaster if you happen to have a French accent. My publicist had warned me about of the horror of attempting to travel by local transport in a hostile country. ‘They get lost and break down all the time,’ she said. It sounded like fun. I’d expected a 1952 Bedford with wooden benches and a beer-breathed driver called Taffy and his chippie wife Bronwyn with black smoke coming out of the rear pipe (The bus, not Bronwyn.) The publicist insisted I take a taxi for safety. I reminded her that three weeks earlier, not that far away, a taxi driver had massacred half the county in an armed rage. She assured me that only happened once every six months or thereabouts. Even so, we opted for the bus where at least there’d be eye-witnesses and we could always drop down behind the seat while other passengers were being mowed down. Of course, the sleek modern bus was a huge disappointment to me, just as the lack of a passport stamp was a disappointment to Jess.

We pulled into Hay and said goodbye to our fellow passengers, all white haired elderly ladies apart from one bald one. They invited us to tea if we found ourselves with a spare moment. We were staying at Ye Olde Black Lion public house. Jess insisted on checking us in ‘cause she’d downloaded ‘Ten Common Phrases in Welsh’ from the internet. I’d agreed to test her for several hours on the train from Paddington until she had the intonation down pat. She said it was a language very similar to the central Thai patois of Suphanburi.

‘Lllewalynallykripatill’, she said to the smiling receptionist. (‘Get them ewes out from under the sewage tank, Lassie.’)

‘Sorry?’ said Latitia the Belaruzian desk clerk.

‘Llllluminiumllachhert,’ said Jess. (‘You Welsh certainly make a mean rarebit.’)

Latitia looked in my direction and smiled apologetically. ‘Sorry, please tell your adopted refugee daughter I don’t speak Vietnamese.’ That shut Jess up till dinner time. She hates being confused for an adopted Vietnamese refugee even more than I hate being compared to Alexander McCall Smith.

We spent the next day popping in and out of bookshops. According to the Hay chamber of commerce there are eleven bookshops for every man, woman, child and golden retriever in the village. How it became the second hand book dealer capital of the UK nobody seems to know. But I tell you I’d have very little chance of snapping up a 1958 forensic science textbook with margin annotations on the gulf of Thailand. Perhaps riding my elation, Jess announced at the end of the day that we were going to move to Wales. We popped in to see Edwyn at the real estate and green grocery and looked at prices. Jess was impressed at how everything looked just like the villages in Midsommer Murders, her favourite police drama series. Again I pointed out that the gory death toll in Midsommer is about eight a week but that didn’t deter her. She’d had to forego her addiction to the show once I’d given her the choice, ‘me or the TV’. That decision had been a very close call so I didn’t want to push my luck by giving her the ultimatum, ‘me or Wales’. I figured I’d leave it up to the weather. Our visit had coincided with the three days of summer they get along the Wye valley. Everyone was wearing revealing shorts and halter necks, even the women, and I could see how a Thai’s fancy might be swept up in the heat. But the average daily rainfall in Wales is twenty-eight yards and the temperatures regularly dip below those of Finland. Yes, I agree, hugging a sheep in warm weather is therapeutic, some might even say ‘erotic’ and despite my better judgement, I’m glad we did it, but wait till the rains come. Nobody loves a soggy sheep. Ask Matt Beynon Rees.