To encourage tourism this country has decided to re-brand itself. Yeah, and that’s the snappy title it came up with. Somebody got paid for thinking of that? (The previous slogan was "Simply Surprising" - !) As Mrs Dilo says pithily, "Yes, in this land you can choose to eat either a potato or a beetroot”. I had another Basil Fawlty moment. So, as I’ve become obsessed by lists - give me a subject, any subject, I’ll give you a 10-point list about it, easy - here are 10 better epithets. I’m not claiming they’re especially funny, but I hardly needed to break into a sweat thinking them up, which is the point. There’s a couple of pointless rhyming ones for starters:The Land of James Joyce
Joycie never made it here, but he did work for some time in Pula - a town in Croatia - which is also the worst swearword in the Romanian language. He’d have liked that.
The Land of Max Boyce
Boycie never made it here either, as far as I know; but we have rugby, sheep, and lots of prime cowshit for him to grow his giant leeks in.
This Land Is Your Land
Soap-dodging American protest singer Woody Guthrie also never got here. Maybe just as well: his anthem about land rights might have been misunderstood in a country whose 1930s fascists took to wearing symbolic bags of soil around their necks.
Get Orff Moy Laaaand!!
Viz Magazine’s Farmer Palmer would look a daft bastard: each farm is so small that any trespasser would have walked to the other side of it before he’d finished that final vowel. We’ve plenty of work for The Fat Slags though.
The Promised Land
If you've been promised that you can come and live in this country, we'll support you, as long as you get the Gypsies and Hungarians to move on. Milk and honey provided. Live The Dream.
Land of Hope and Glory
Nadia Comăneci, Ilie Năstase, rabies vaccine, the discovery of insulin, the world’s first unassisted-take-off aeroplane flight in 1906, the world’s first jet aeroplane in 1910....
World of Leather
The crumpled, smelly, black leather jacket is the traditional costume of the proletarian Romanian who’s built all of Spain and Italy’s patios with his special “Moldovan Mix” concrete made to a secret recipe of sawdust, dog bones and cornflakes.
Lands on its Feet
Despite amazingly low wages, low manners and the low esteem in which they are held abroad, Romanians muddle along with surprisingly low levels of suicide, self-consciousness and self-questioning.
The Land that Time Forgot
This is the obvious one for f**k’s sake. Horse-drawn carts in towns, oxen-drawn ones in the hills... an embarrassment to Romanians, but western tourists love this kind of shit! Throw in the funny costumes, cute furry animals and cheap booze and the Tourist Board should wake up to the fact they’re sitting on a bucolic Las Vegas.
Manuel, let me explain:
