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Only two intricately embroidered red silk cushions perched on Ken Miller's sofa lend a hint of the Orient to his domestic environment.
Other than that, all is as you might expect in the small sheltered accommodation block near Swansea which has been the pensioner's home for the past three years.
There is a comfortable communal lounge, where a number of the elderly residents can be seen shuffling around or enjoying a game of cards. And there is, inevitably, a Stannah stairlift which helps to convey the more infirm from the ground floor to the first.
Quite what Mr Miller's new bride will make of it all one can only guess. Given that at the moment she is experiencing more than a few difficulties with the language, perhaps no one will ever know anyway.
For now, 44-year-old Lei Genxiao is still in China, awaiting immigration checks before she arrives to join her husband of less than a month. Marriage certificate notwithstanding, it is by no means certain when - or if - she will get her British visa.
Back in Wales, however, Mr Miller has secured one small victory to smooth the path of his happy union.
After several weeks of bureaucratic wrangling, he has secured the right of his new wife to move into his onebedroom subsidised flat - despite the misgivings of council officials. Given that all the residents of Maes-y-Darren are of pensionable age, it was felt Genxiao was too young to join the club.
This week, officials had to concede they have no legal basis to keep her out, given that she is now Mr Miller's lawful wife.
It is not the only battle he has had to fight. With his 70th birthday just months away, some sharp tongues have suggested that it is not Mr Miller's keen mind and slim frame that have proved such a lure for his blushing new wife.
The particularly unkind have made comparisons to Ting Tong, the mail order Thai bride played to grotesque effect by Matt Lucas in the hit TV show Little Britain.
Together with the continuing absence of the new Mrs Miller, it is enough to put a dampener on anyone's honeymoon. But yesterday, the Mail found Mr Miller in good spirits and eager to mount a robust defence of his latest romantic entanglement.
'People have said to me that she's just after a visa. To which I say: "Yes, of course she wants a visa. Of course she wants a better life. And who can blame her?" But it works both ways - I get companionship, so I think it's a fair gamble.
'It's all very well everyone taking the moral high ground but as far as I'm concerned that's their own pettiness. This is my life and after all my years, I've earned the right to do as I please.'
But is he being more than a little naive in hoping that a mail order bride with whom he can barely communicate will provide him with true companionship in his dotage?
Mr Miller has certainly been rather unlucky in love in the past. Brought up in Oxford by his bus conductress mother Peggy, he never knew his father and at 18 ran away to join the Navy.
His job took him to the Pacific, when he was drafted in to take part in the H-bomb tests in the Christmas Islands in 1958.
He was stationed for a time in Southsea, Hampshire, where he met his first wife, Megs, proposing after just three dates despite the fact that at 38 she was 15 years older.
The couple wed in March 1960 in Oxford and were married for more than 30 years until Megs died from stomach cancer in 1990. They did not have children, after Megs suffered several miscarriages. 'It was a sadness, of course, although now it means I've no one to please but myself,' Mr Miller says.
A marriage to his second wife Gail ended after eight years in 2000, whereupon Gail got half the proceeds from the sale of the home he had once shared with Megs.
Despite this expensive setback, it seems Mr Miller has not yet had his fill of the fairer sex.
Indeed, since being given a place in the sheltered housing complex in 2003 due to declining health - he has had both hips replaced and is awaiting knee and hernia operations - he has been hankering after some female company, but struggling to find it.
This all changed when, last July, a friend in the nursing home told Mr Miller he had seen an advert in a local newspaper for a dating agency which specialised in matching British lonely hearts with Chinese brides. 'He had already made an appointment so I asked if I could accompany him to see what it was all about,' Mr Miller recalls.
'When we got there, the man who ran the agency was a very ordinary man, not particularly attractive at all, I must say, and he had this lovely, attentive Chinese wife. It got me thinking. I thought: "I wouldn't mind a bit of that."
At this point Mr Miller's companion got cold feet but, undeterred, Mr Miller ploughed on. Handing over his fee of £300, he was put in touch with Genxiao, a 44-year-old shop worker from the southern city of Nanning, near the Vietnamese border.
Furnished with only a picture and some sparse biographical detail, Mr Miller was forced to turn to the internet for assistance in establishing a relationship with his new 'girlfriend'.
'Communication has from the start been a problem, and continues to be,' he admits with staggering understatement.
'We couldn't speak each other's language so we got to know each other on email by using one of those internet search engine translating devices. They're not always very accurate but it meant we could at least have some contact.'
The mind boggles at the thought of this ageing Casanova trying to assess the qualities of his putative bride in pidgin English via email. Yet Mr Miller managed to discover that his bride is divorced with two grown-up sons, and an adopted 15-year-old daughter who will stay in China when - and if - her mother comes to Britain. 'She's not part of the package,' he says firmly.
Even before they came face to face, in November Mr Miller got into a spat with Neath Port Talbot council over his married living arrangements.
'Just before I flew out to meet her for the first time in November, the council housing officer was here and I mentioned to her that I hoped to bring my new wife back here,' he says.
'She said to me: "You do realise that in no way would the young lady in question be able to spend so much as a single night here?" I was stunned. As far as I was concerned she would be my wife and that was entirely my business.'
'By the time I left for China on November 24 last year, the council had also told me that no, she couldn't come and live here. I wasn't at all sure what I was going to do because I was intending to bring her straight back.'
So, three months after first being 'introduced', Mr Miller made the long journey east to meet his prospective bride, his bag stuffed with the documentation required for the anticipated wedding in China. It would be a particularly steely man who did not have nerves about such a meeting, and Mr Miller confesses he was terrified.
'I did think, "What am I doing?"' he admits. 'I wasn't even completely sure what she looked like. But then I came out of the airport and there was this woman in a white jacket jumping up and down in the arrivals area, shouting "Ken, Ken" at the top of her voice.'
There is, of course, no etiquette book to turn to for advice on meeting one's mail order bride for the first time.
'I must admit I didn't quite know what to do,' Mr Miller says, 'but she made the decision for me, to be honest. Put it this way - she was so tactile that it took us an hour to get across the car park.'
Since Lei Genxiao still lived with her mother, the happy couple wasted no time in finding a hotel, where, although Mr Miller chooses to draw a veil over the precise nature of the liaison, it seems clear they had little hesitation in consummating the relationship.
'The first thing I really wanted was a bath after all that travelling,' he says. 'But put it this way - that bath took several hours.' Perhaps this is that Mr Miller means by ' companionship'.
Emboldened by the success of the first meeting, he rented a onebedroom flat with Lei for the duration of his six-week stay, and preparations were put in place for their nuptials.
It was not all hearts and flowers, however. Communication continued to be a problem and, frustrated, Mr Miller had to resort to buying a small handheld computerised translation device to facilitate conversation.
'That didn't work very well, though,' he says. 'It didn't necessarily follow what you were trying to say at all. One time when I typed in "affection" it came up with "love for an elephant" instead. In the end I gave up using it after it took me a whole day just to ask her three questions.'
Mr Miller continues to insist this is not an insurmountable problem, nor will he entertain talk of the scores of British men who have gone down the same road with a mail order bride, only to find themselves abandoned and alone - often with plundered bank accounts - once their wife has obtained a British visa.
'You have to trust your instincts. There was just a real bond between us,' he says, apparently without a hint of irony.
'No, we don't speak each other's language, but we felt very easy in each other's company; and put it this way, if that lady was putting on an act, then she was doing it very well.'
Indeed, after a couple of agonisingly long bus journeys through China to be furnished with the proper documentation, proceedings for the wedding went ahead. On December 19, the happy couple went to the administrative offices in Nanning for what Mr Miller thought were further document checks.
'We had a translator and I had to fill in a form giving my background. I was then given a paragraph I had to read out and Lei did the same. There was a bit more writing and I said to the lady in charge: "So when can we get married then?" She pointed to the document on the page and apparently that was it. No fuss really, no best man or bridesmaids.'
Nor was that the end of the bureaucratic process. Mrs Miller has not yet been allowed to leave China. Instead, she must undergo a full immigration hearing in March and even then, there are no guarantees that her visa will be granted.
'We'll have to cross that bridge when we come to it,' Mr Miller says.
He returned home this week to the good news that the local council had been forced to concede they had no legal grounds for refusing Mrs Miller permission to stay with him.
'It was rather ironic because when I did get home there were some balloons attached to my front door and a banner saying "Congratulations Mr and Mrs Miller". It was a nice thought ... except of course I was on my own.'
What a humiliating setback. For now, the newlyweds remain divided by thousands of miles, linked only by stuttering conversations over the internet.
Astonishingly, for a brief couple of days, they were also linked by Mr Miller's cashpoint card after he made the decision to leave it with his bride: 'I told her she could draw out about £35 every Tuesday to help her out.' This generosity was brought to an end with 48 hours of his return, however, when his bank discovered his action and cancelled the card.
'She hadn't drawn anything out, though,' he says. Indeed, Mr Miller insists that if his wife does get her papers, she intends not to be a burden on the welfare state. 'She's hoping to enrol in an English language school and get a job,' he says. 'I've told her what's mine is hers, although frankly there's not a lot of it.'
So what will Lei Genxiao make of Wales, one wonders? And what on earth will she make of the fact that, without exception, all her new neighbours are entitled to a free bus pass?
'I'm conscious of it possibly going wrong, of course I am,' says Mr Miller. 'But look at it the other way. I've got five, maybe ten years left on the clock. Six months ago, mine was a very vacant life. Now it's full and happy.
'If I get two, three years out of the marriage, then great. Maybe I'll get the rest of my life.' And with that, he turns back to the translation website in a desperate attempt to understand what on earth his new wife is trying to say to him.
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