I have no doughnuts but I have dumplings

So said the waitress one night in Sinaia. In Sighisoara (hope I've spelt that right) all our dreams came true.

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.

The meat of the matter

Someone (whom I would never disappoint willingly) asked what we ate last night. I had gigot d'agneau (leg of lamb). Gigot is related to gigue (leg) and giguer which means to hop about or something. Not sure if the English jig is connected. There's also 'gratin dauphinois' which means gratin from the province of Dauphiné.

This photo is more interesting if you use your mouse roller to zoom in and out - play the Ride of the Valkyrie at the same time and you're in meaty multi-media heaven.

Bucharest fast food

This chicken outlet in the centre of Bucharest is fairly hard not to miss.

In identity terms, it testifies I suppose to Romanian humour (in the light of bird flu), which I also saw in an exhibition (can't put photos on here for fear of copyright) of cartoons, for example showing Romanians taking over Covent Garden with big stars on stages and Roma beggars at the door. We were talking in our tutorial the other day about whether minorities use humour as a kind of strategy - I think Romania isn't really a minority, but it maybe feels kind of on the edge or something (as far as one can generalise).

Two alternative takes on Killer Chicken - this one http://viapontica.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/hilarious-name-killer-chicken-bucharest-fast-food-outlet/ from an ex-LSE man turned property market analyst, contrasts with the more sybaritic http://therockmother.blogspot.com/2007/06/you-say-roumania-i-say-romania.html

Fonko rules OK

Here's the label from the wine we had last night at our local Serbian restaurant (scallops on blinis was nice). The wine is actually Macedonian and as you can see it's named after Bucephall (ox-head - strange) Alexander's horse, who ended up in present-day Pakistan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porus - not bad for his selling price of thirteen talents. Talking of talent, I think Miss California is great - not many people could stand on stage in front of all America wearing next to nothing and say anything at all about gay marriage, and she has helped the gay marriage cause no end.

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.

Bel....

....is a small town near Geel (North East of Brussels - about one hour's drive) famous for its sandy soil. As you can see, this extends even into the woods.

Bel is on the TOM-TOM but it is not on many maps - we found our way there by negotiating the Aarschot Ring, which has a windmill so is more pretty than it sounds.

The unmarked walking route (10 kilometres plus 1000 kilometres and/or years wasted trying to understand the stupid directions in our guidebook) starts by an old graveyard and then takes you to lots of gloomy pine forests. We needed the walk though as last night we went out with a group of very select young ladies, the oldest of which was 88 - think we had about four courses.

A Twist of Malice

........and Happy Easter too!



A Twist of Malice is the title of a collection of poems by grey-haired (one assumes) women. You can find a proper review here http://www.saltpublishing.com/horizon/issues/02/text/boden_julie_review.htm (scroll down). I read it through in one sitting last night. Top marks for accessibility and entertainment value, although the effect of loads of poems with basically a similar array of messages (leading on from the various sections the poets have to work in) and props (contemporary British life zzzzzzz) is a bit numbing. It's the kind of stuff you could read on the train, but you're unlikely to remember it for the rest of your days. I counteracted the effect of all that reality and short-term pyrotechnics by reading some surrealist love poetry - http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/098710.html - more to my taste, although the celebratory tone of the surrealist stuff is arguably just as dubious and gendered as the tone of the more cynical grey hens. Best really just to go and eat a cake.

Coulis scrumptious

Here's what our friends cooked us last night (inter alia).