Avoca is a picturesque village located on the Avoca River in County Wicklow. It was a copper mining and hand-weaving center in times past. Today it is probably better known, at least to BBC fans, as Ballykissangel, because that is where the series was filmed. Laetitia and her group did some hikes through the beautiful Vale of Avoca and visited the monastery at Glendalough before heading to Avoca, where they planned to spend the evening.

As usual Laetitia went early to the pub where she was meeting her group for dinner so she could think about a limerick for the day. She sat at the bar, close enough to a table of young women to hear the complaint of one of them about an encounter with a young man from Rome at a local party that featured international dance music. The woman had taken dance lessons for several years and was proficient in a number of international dance styles such as tango, rumba, jitterbug, and polka. The man was very handsome but had little English, so her attempts to have a conversation with him fell flat. When the band struck up an Eastern European dance tune and she asked him if he wanted to polka, she was dismayed when he led her outside to the shadows and tried to lift her dress. He seemed surprised when she made some indignant remarks and left the dance to go for coffee. Apparently he had picked up enough English slang to confuse “polka” with “poke,” the latter pronounced with an “a” sound at the end as Italians often do. The conversation gave Laetitia the limerick of the day.

When a lass at a dance in Avoca
Asked a man from Rome if he would polka
Much to her distress
He lifted her dress
So she left and went out for a mocha.