When Jack was young his parents told him he'd grow up to be a Belgian. He thought this was some sort of a parrot, and he was looking forward to being one of them. But when he was eighteen he realised the truth. He was walking down the street one day and he looked around him instead of staying inside with his daydreams. The realisation suddenly dawned on him. "I'm living in Belgium!" he said to himself.
   He regretted not paying more attention in school. He thought his life might have taken a different course if he'd realised much sooner that he was from Belgium. He asked his friends about it. Some of them had realised they were from Belgium when they were only ten. He felt as if they had a head start in life.
   When he was thirty he realised that all of his friends were married and he was still single. He tried many different methods of finding a wife. He took up golf. It turned out to be an effective way of breaking windows, but the number of wives he had remained at zero. He tried growing potatoes. His number of wives remained unchanged, and he couldn't tell if the potato-growing was more or less effective than the golf.
   He got lost in the fog one night. He had heard stories about people who got lost in the fog at night and came out of it engaged to a person who was twice as heavy as them. This was the one wife-finding method he wanted to avoid.
   When he emerged from the fog he was attached to a woman who might well have been nearly twice as heavy as him, but she didn't look overweight because she was so tall. She was at least a foot taller than him. Marriage to her wouldn't be so bad, he thought. He might strain his neck from looking up at her all the time, but he was expecting to be at least ten inches taller by the time he was forty, so he'd nearly have caught up with her by then.
   There was tension before the wedding. He didn't like some of her friends, especially the one who had the fangs, and the one who had the fangs was going to be a bridesmaid. As the big day drew nearer he realised that the bridesmaid with fangs was distracting him from the fact that his fiancee bought her wedding dress from a corpse.
   He nearly broke off their engagement on the night before the wedding when he found out she was Belgian. But he spent some time thinking about it and he realised that he would have been more shocked if she said she wasn't Belgian. So the wedding went ahead. They've been happily married for four years now, but he still hasn't bridged the gap in height.