“My tongue always runs away from me. I can never get it right. I’m always mixing things up: Freud and Fred the tap-dancer; or these days, Tintin and Desmond Tutu, Madame Bovary and Monsieur Bovine. The list goes on, it’s a Belgian thing…”, says Jean-Pierre Verheggen.

These Freudian slips and mixed-up sounds, these typos on the tips of our tongues are so typical of us. We stubbornly persist in our errors, turning them into grandiose shows of bravado. In my part of Northern France, this led to the invention of Zeph Cafougnette, a typical “ch’ti” character, who always muddles things up wherever he goes, and makes me think of Verheggen from across the border in Belgium, with all his mixed-up words.

L’Oral et Hardi (read: Laurel and Hardy) brings together some epic texts by Verheggen – his frivolous odes, his harangues, his linguistic transes, his overblown speeches and manifest manifestos. Jean-Pierre loves the sound of words – most of his titles are based around puns. As fellow Belgian writer Marcel Moreau said, he is a “benevolent kind of do-gooder, but he can be scary, with his razor-sharp knife for slicing vocabulary, his chainsaw for chopping down syntax and grammar-stains on his apron. But he’s not a butcher”. Jean-Pierre is all about the joyful adventure of words. He’s a poet, a phenomenon, a firebrand – and the inventor of new genres.” Jacques Bonnaffé

Before leaving the wooden boards of the stage one final time (farewell to the farm and compound), let’s not beat around the bush. A well-chosen slice of sweet-talking is better than a long speech. The task will fall to L’Oral et Hardi, a poetic allocution which Jacques Bonnaffé will tailor to the circumstances – a kind of final awards night for Dromesko, for all its works and its (very) extended family.