Bad Liebenzell is a valley village full of flowers, where walkers carry a spear in each hand and pairs of pumpkins live on benches with no explanations, a large one next to a tiny one, all down the street and no-one sits down next to them.
Halloween enthusiasm stretched out to the border, where just inside the first service station entrance stood sixty witches, all with the same mouth-agape gleeface, some three feet tall and some three inches small, rubber or plastic and welcome to Germany. Oktoberfest was nowhere in sight, but Lidl is rife and cheap beer cheaper than in France, and if you take the bottles back you can put them in the whirring laser-tunnel that eats empties and kerchings a voucher into your shaking hand, which, if you can hold onto it, can be spent exactly like money, on delicious seasonal goods like beer and wine. Why isn't there one of these in every supermarket in England?
