Towns "untwinning".....?

[d9f1c7]

Was this only ever a device to send councilors on beanos? Has anything useful ever come out of twinning?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16408111

[jno]

sure, it helped re-establish international ties after WW2. For instance, Coventry, Dresdenm and Stalingrad - all heavily bombed - became "twin" towns.

[ichkeria]

My home town twinning arrangement sent hundred of schoolchildren back and forth between N. Ireland and France at no expense to the tax payer, gave lots of young people including myself paid work experience, at no expense to the tax payer - as far as I know it still does.
There are/were also business and sporting as well as cultural benefits.

[craft1948]

York was twinned with Dijon and every year there were exchange trips with my school and one over there.
My daughter went on a twinning trip and found her new best friend in France.......she has been her bridesmaid and is godmother to her first child.....25 years later they are still the best of friends.

[Mosaic]

I've seen great friendships and positive results, mainly in education, but most of all I have seen this used as a jolly for councillors and their suck-up chief officers.

[B00]

My area's twinned with Bocholt in Germany. Poor bloody Germany, not only did they lose the war, they get twinned with the armpit of the North, sometimes life really does crap on you from a great height doesn't it?

[joko]

my area has been twinned with Mons in Belgium, since 1964.

I am 40 and lived here all my life - and this is the first i've ever heard of it.

[Old_Geezer]

OK for some I suppose. Personally, I never got offered anything out of it. Strange though that it should be all the rage in the 1960s and yet of little benefit today. I'm unsure what the dramatic change has been. Maybe it is all down to budgets, since today's councils can't seem to supply the services our parents or grandparents took for granted.

[bookbinder]

My wife and I used to be members of a twinning association. Our activities were on a lower scale than councillors, and similar nobs, going on beanos. We went to an industrial town in northern Germany for a week at a time, and stayed with ordinary families. The German families came to us, and stayed with us. Both sides were interested in getting to know people from another country, and some long-lasting friendships were formed. It was just a social arrangement, and nothing more than that.

[ichkeria]

The deprecation of twinning is part, I think, of the current trend to see anything which cannot be expressed in terms of shopping or personal profit etc. as naturally a case of someone other than them, be it a "fat councillor" etc. getting something for nothing or something they don't deserve. Eventually the wheel will turn. Until then, batten down the hatches and pray to the God of Strictly Come Dancing and low credit ratings lol

[Mosaic]

I stumbled across Rue du Glossop in Millau, Languedoc-Rousillion. Glossop had long since forgotten it was twinned with Millau.

[ichkeria]

Another intriguing side to twinning is the sheer incongruity of some of the matches. For example sleepy Cheltenham, home of GCHQ, with Sochi (or Russian-Mafia-On-Sea as some of us like to call it) (!)

[LeMarchand]

The councillors in Wincanton are constantly going on expense-paid trips to Ankh-Morpork! ;o)