At the arms of Brussels

It's a good place - you can eat really well for 40 euros or so - in my case chicory soup, North Seafood gratin, fattened chicken, chocolate mousse, five hundred litres of house wine - and our waiter Patrick (who is not the guy on the left) was brilliant. I lost weight again - not sure why.

As this is a serious academic and political blog I should point out that the image on the left clearly highlights the enlightened tripartite identity of militarism, Catholicism and gastronomy that is hegemonic pursuant to the recent European elections. If only OUSA were as diverse, I can hear you sadly mutter.

On sera à Troyes ce soir!

For those of you don't know French, that means that you're going to have a threesome this evening, or, alternatively, as our Greek friend said 'So you're going to Troy? Fantastic!'.

This is Troyes, former capital of Champagne, taken last week. I could show you pictures of half-timbered houses and loads of great modern art but I thought this moonlit shot of the cinema complex on the edge of the old town was more interesting.

You'll see in the distance the Hippotamus Grill. Imagine our disappointment when they said they don't grill African wildlife. So we headed into town. Here's a list of all the meals we had in France/Switzerland last week. I put on a pound, which isn't bad. My Mike Easy Diet tip for holidays is not to have breakfast, walk around a lot during the day and then do Canadian Air Force exercises in the morning - easy stuff like touching your toes, leg-lifts (doesn't matter whose), press-ups (not to be confused with press-downs, which is where you pin your latest holiday lover to the bed), and sit-ups (not to be confused with stand-ups, a breed of people whose jokes are much better than mine).

Here is the list of food and drink. I could do pictures but most people probably have a kind of gastro-porn filter now (as supplied in OU software on the advice of OUSA) and wouldn't be able to see them.

TROYES - raffariat de champagne (bit like sherry), crudités in a cream cheese and basil dressing, chicken leg in raffariat sauce with baked herby potatoes, tarte tatin and cream.

BOURG-EN-BRESSE - pizza grand' mère (take one grandmother, make her into lardons and sprinkle her on goat's cheese), salad including a cornet of filo pastry filled with chicon

LAUSANNE - artichoke and asparagus salad (all fresh), féra (a white fish from Lake Geneva), gratin de fruits d'été (kind of like strawberries with cold custard)

NANCY - curry - the French have started going for an Indian on Saturday night, or at least the boys of Nancy have - all very macho.

Mountains and seas

That's the name of the resto last night we went to. We were interrrupted by some strange text messages that I cannot go into here! This food was good (escalope pizzaiola - here's a recipe http://www.paperblog.fr/511187/escalopes-de-veau-a-la-pizzaiola/ basically it's veal bashed up and a sauce made up of bashed up bits of tomato, garlic, capers, origano and white wine - really it should be called bashed up cow). It also made me take off one and a half pounds. On the way back I lay on the pavement and took pictures of cherry blossom illuminated by street-lamps, but I won't put them here because I'm in anti-flower mode.

The MED (Mike Easy Diet)

If you look at me on Facebook I often look like a big orange greasy ball. Round about early March I decided to do something about it (fat, not Facebook - how could I do anything about Facebook?), particularly as I was getting to the 'can't run to catch a bus' phase.

All the advice says that you need to change your lifestyle but maybe only in small ways. So you could chop off a leg and lose weight, but it's better to just file it down gently over a number of weeks. The best book I found was Fat Bloke Slims by Bruce Byron. He said a couple of things that rang true for me: first of all, you're likely to put on weight after bereavement (I think that's potentially a big cop-out, but I guess you are likely to shut up shop metabolism-wise and think it's OK to eat and drink a lot as life is short) and also most people have one weakness that kind of tips the balance. In his case, it was drinking every day - not very huge amounts, but still enough to pile on the kilos. Add into the mix less exercise, the effects of aging and voilà - a big orange greasy ball.

Anyway, this is my plan:

- two to four days a week off alcohol
- exercise of an hour each day (must not involve any equipment or going outside - do stuff like climb the stairs four at a time - but must involve good music)
- don't take it seriously
- change the scales over to stones and pounds rather than kilos because progress seems faster

The results:

- 15-20 cm off the waist (depending on how hard you breath in)
- about a pound lost a week (i.e. eight pounds) - but it's more like bumping down into certain brackets where you can go three or so pounds each way.

All I need to do now is spin this out for another 150 pages and I can write a best-selling diet book.