A Briton who moved to the Grand Duchy a year ago and is desperately seeking the nationality has claimed that his desire to become Luxembourgish has nothing to do with Brexit, but that it has always been his greatest fantasy.
“When I was a lad playing war and guns, my mates would always want to be marines storming Juno Beach in Normandy,” Charles Bearden explained. “I’d say, no, let’s be a band of resistance fighters trapped in a castle in the north of Luxembourg, fighting off the Waffen-SS.”
“And they’d say, what’s Luxembourg?” he continued. “And I’d say, I don’t know, and it’s possible that I’ve just made it up, but it sounds dreamy.”
When all the other boys were obsessed with Star Wars toys, Bearden says that he collected Luxembourgish Royal Family action figures.
“I almost had them all,” he says. “I was just missing one of the princes.”
Later, Bearden says, he spent a gap year in Australia where he refused to eat anything at sausage sizzles, proclaiming that he only ate Luxembourgish sausages.
“I told those Ozzies that it was mettwurst or nothing,” he said. “I’d rather starve than eat anything less than the best. And for as long as I can remember, I’ve only drunk Diekirch. None of that English lager or fancy Belgian stuff.”
Later, when Bearden moved back to his hometown in England, he literally sang a different tune while everyone in the pub was belting out “Glory, Glory Man United” during Premier League matches.
“There I was over in the corner softly humming ‘The Angels Fly Over Schifflange,’ which is something I’d composed in my spare time,” he said. “Either that, or ‘My Heart Yearns for Wiltz.’”
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Originally published by RTL Today on December 28, 2018