Clacton / Valence: French sister-city in dark about brother-in-law


23:00 Sat, 01 Aug 2026

Clacton has a siter-city relationship with the beautiful city of Valence in France. Valence is approximately 100km south of Lyon on the main freeway, railway and Rhone river towards Marseille.

If Clacton is your sister city, does that mean the MP who had to resign is your brother-in-law? The French term for brother-in-law is beau-frère which literally means "beautiful brother". I interviewed many people in France and published the video below to explore this extended family. The video was recorded in Valence and produced in Lyon, the birthplace of the cinema.

The journey between Clacton-on-Sea and Valence can be completed in a long day of driving or train journeys. I highly recommend these mutual visits for residents of both cities.

With the campaign for the Clacton-on-Sea by-election now hotting up, I decided to expand the field of combat to include the sister city of Valence.

While the workers at Tendring District Council in Clacton had to cancel their annual leave to organise the by-election, there is little thought of politics in the south of France during the months of July and August. In the French system, people who work for the local council have between seven and ten weeks of annual leave and they take half of those vacations in summer.

Each summer the city of Valence has a free concert called Champ de Mars. I was surprised to find that I was the only by-election candidate at Champ de Mars but I feel it is really important to invest in Clacton's foreign relations. Why not do like a professional diplomat and gatecrash your neighbour's summer party?

I don't think I would win an election in Valence. Over half the people I met told me they are fans of Maia. I started school in the region of Melbourne where Kylie Minogue was a TV star on Neighbours. Could Maia follow Kylie to London one day? Here is a video of my efforts to resurrect the sister-city relationship between Clacton-sur-Mer and Valence.

Unfortunately, I suffered some sound recording problems later in the evening when the music became louder and at the same time, when I added a power bank, the recording app changed the source settings. Nonetheless, the responses are clear from the body language.

Major policy announcements in France

  1. Clacton-on-Sea will be referred to as Clacton-sur-Mer on all publicity material for our friends in France.
  2. Essex Police will be deployed to search for big cats like the Essex Lion in the mountains of the Drome region.
  3. Maia is invited to perform on Clacton's beach
Kylie Minogue, Maïa Wojcik

 

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