Brussels art

I can't remember who did this, but it has a nice polly-chromatic feel and shows that a trip to Brussels is always worthwhile.

Cherry trees are best by night

This isn't the best road for cherry trees in Brussels, but lit up by streetlamps this white cherry tree looked pretty funky (I'm lying on my back).

The main cherry tree area in Brussels (see here http://mikeinbrussels.blogspot.com/2009/04/schaerbeek.html) has a joint Belgo-Japanese celebration every April. The commune Schaerbeek produced cherries for the famous Kriek beer and so I guess that's why they planted loads. This road Avenue des Cerisiers is split between two communes one of which is Schaerbeek - you can tell the border because the street signs change.

Presumptive stuff

Here is a café in the Avenue Livingstone in Brussels, just down the hill from the main EU buildings, appropriately called the Livingstone. Livingstone has a connection with Brussels via Stanley and the Congo, so there's a kind of colonial echo and reflection here. The café though is in competition with a big Irish bar called the Wild Geese (that has its own resonance I guess), a Tesco metro type supermarket, and used to be near a couple of German beer bars that have closed down. Now if you want to have a German beer and ambience you have to go out to Wezembeek-Oppem, near the German School.

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.

Schaerbeek........

.......is a suburb of Brussels. As you can see, they go in for cherry trees in a big way.



Don't forget you can click on photos to make them look big.