Tales of the Country: How I met my local multimillionaire

Strange as it seems, there is a corner of Hereford that is forever Holland. A strong Dutch flavour permeates the Left Bank Village, a marvellous complex of shops and bars overlooking the river Wye. The café is called De Koffie Pot, and the deli sells jars of rodekool met appel (which sounds so much heartier, somehow, than red cabbage with apple), not to mention gouda every which way – with cumin, without cumin, mature, extra mature, Victor Mature... you name it.

The sheer Dutchness of the Left Bank Village, as well as the way it caters for disabilities, even to the extent of featuring Braille on noticeboards, are clues to the identity of the man who created and owns it: Albert Heijn. Dr Heijn is a wheelchair-using, septuagenarian philanthropist, the scion of the Albert Heijn supermarket chain, Holland's equivalent of Sainsbury's. And he and his wife live not, like most Dutch multimillionaires, in Amsterdam, or Monte Carlo, or the Caribbean, but in Pudleston, Herefordshire.

Pudleston is not known for its multi-millionaires, Dutch or otherwise. Indeed, like Docklow, Pudleston is barely known at all. It is more an assortment of houses than a village, of which the biggest house by some distance is a wonderful, castellated Victorian folly called Pudleston Court, where the Heijns live. Pudleston Court is only about two miles from us as the crow flies (if the farmer doesn't shoot him first – which he quite frequently does). Given the scarcity of people around here, this makes the Heijns our near-neighbours.

There are ways and means of meeting one's neighbours. Dropping in on the pretence of needing to borrow a bag of sugar is a good one, especially when your neighbours are supermarket tycoons and so probably have a few bags to spare. But it is not so easy to drop in on the Heijns, largely because they are surrounded by pretty heavy-duty security, provoked by the kidnapping and murder of Dr Heijn's brother, Gerrit Jan, in 1987.

Instead, I asked their Dutch butler – whose parents have stayed in our cottages a couple of times – if he could put in a word on my behalf. Back came the message that the Heijns would be pleased to meet me, and so it was that one sunny afternoon a couple of weeks ago, the gates of Pudleston Court swung open for me and I pointed my scruffy VW Polo up the majestic drive, passing a couple of ornamental lakes and a small herd of alpacas, as you do.

A housekeeper let me into the entrance hall, where I was greeted by Monique Heijn, a warm, handsome woman in her fifties. She led me into a grand drawing-room, where at first I was not aware of an elderly man sitting quietly in an armchair: Albert Heijn. He apologised for not getting up, and later gave me his truly fascinating autobiography, Albert Heijn: The Life and Times of a Global Grocer, which explains how he contracted polio, in 1944. The book also details the terrible fate of Gerrit Jan, and Dr Heijn's part in the development of the bar code, which is more thrilling than it sounds. It's quite a story.

We talked for well over an hour; about the company, founded by his grandfather in 1887, and about the house, which the Heijns have painstakingly restored. It was built in 1848 for Elias Chadwick, a Lancashire coal baron; it was a hospital during the Second World War (the vet and author James Herriot was one of the patients), and then became a local authority borstal – during which incarnation someone had the brilliant idea of covering much of the interior in the rubberised yellow paint used for marking yellow lines on roads, doubtless the remnants of a job lot. A bugger to get off intricate cornicing, apparently.

I also wanted to know how they wound up living in Pudleston, of all improbable places. It turned out that Mrs Heijn, although Dutch, has lived in Herefordshire since 1967. When they married 10 years ago, after a When Harry Met Sally-type saga of knowing each other for yonks but one or the other always being married to someone else, she wanted to stay in what we all know round here to be God's own country. Every time I have a double latte and slab of apple cake in De Koffie Pot, I reflect that God's own country is lucky to have them.

Even the best laid plans can get scrambled

On a trip to the metropolis two weeks ago, I popped into Selfridges where, as the chirpy conductor on the 159 bus always liked to point out, they really do sell fridges. They also sell emu eggs, dark-green things about the size of rugby balls, for £18.50 each. One emu egg is about the equivalent of 12 standard hen's eggs, so it's hardly an economical purchase, but, if you'll pardon the pun, I shelled out. I couldn't resist the novelty value, especially as we have got used to the diddy eggs laid by our bantams.

Last week, we decided to scramble it for breakfast. I needed a hammer to crack it, revealing a pale green membrane, which I then pierced with a knife. Finally, a vast yolk glopped out. My son Joseph's friend Harry, who had stayed the night, watched all this earnestly, then politely asked "Please may I have cereal?"

A clean sweep in the comedy stakes

Our chimney sweep, who has appeared before in this column, dropped in last week to tackle a jackdaws' nest. His name is Ken Dodd, which is the only reason we selected him, above dozens of others, from Yellow Pages.

He knows this is the reason he gets more business than his rivals, he says, which is why he meets all the predictable quips about his tickling stick and Knotty Ash with a (disappointingly untoothy) smile.