Faridabad

Faridabad celebration

Dancing at Sunset

Appenzell

Took a trip out to Appenzell (where the cheese comes from) in Eastern Switzerland. The snow was deep in some parts, but the roads were dry and clear.

Thousands of other nutters had decided this was the first day of spring and had dusted off their bikes and decided which of the open passes to do. I went on a round trip to Appenzell via Wattwil and wondered at the beauty of Switzerland at the foot of Santis mountain and in Wil, a beautiful medieval town which looks like it was fortified in the 15th century.

Sun was shining and it was warm.

Great day.

Had a great pizza experience this eve in Montreux. Well, to be precice, the pizza was crap, but the experience was an experience.

The pizza first? Calzone - 46 square meters of crust, 20 cubic centimeters of filling, which consisted of cheese (a good start), ham, tomato and egg. Sadly the egg was scrambled and for some reason, the chef (I am being charitable with that description here) decided it was a good idea to include some anchovy fillets. WTF???? Repulsive and positively the worst Calzone I have had anywhere in the world.

I am sure I will be able to prod the errant pieces of vomit down the bidet plughole in the morning, once they have softened a bit.

So - the 'experience'....

I sat on my own in the middle of the restaurant and watched people. They watched me too, with more than a little suspicion.

There, on my left, was a French-Swiss guy of about my age, evidently with his son (15 or 16, public school - either Charterhouse (the 'buggers' school) or Stowe (the 'buggers' school), or Pangbourne (the Navy school. OK so that's another buggers' school too).

And it was clear the son's mum was no longer the dad's wife ... are you with me here? Because they were speaking English... but not just because they were speaking English. The old chap (my age) was telling the young lad that he would 'clear it' with his partner for the lad to come and stay occasionally. Apparently the new partner has a young nipper and expensive taste. The dad told the story about the Fust dishwasher he had before the new partner arrived ("Brand new old boy, with the instructions still in the machine, never used") . But dad came home one day and the partner had ordered a new one - a Miele - all stainless steel. Apparently she still does not know how to work the machine. I guess the disintegrated instructions have blocked the outflow :-)

And then on the other side of me was a male couple (camp as a row of tents). The dominant one was very stylishly dressed, had a shaved head and a liver-coloured labrador dog which he fed from his plate and had tiramasu for pudding (the guy, not the dog). The other half of the couple was watching his weight (raw meat and wasser mit gaz, no pasta, no pizza, no wine, no coffee).

And just next to them was a really strange couple. He was 70+, wearing a baseball cap, had tan-coloured, thinning brown hair (almost like he had combed it through with some brown boot polish) and a 'tantastic' complexion. His tee shirt said, and I quote, because i wrote it down on the napkin: 'Wild West Wealth Summit 2007" and the web link:

http://www.millionairemanifesto.com/

It's possible they were from the US.

He could hardly get around the place (pissed, or crippled - not sure) and She sat there serenely with highlighted blonde hair and a cerise pink suit, very tailored, very expensive with gold buttons and HUUUUGE cuffs. I reckon She was a runner-up in the Miss Texas 1974 contest. She had clearly had some work done on her face (bits of it were too smooth, gently tucked and looked 'pulled' in places) compared to her veiny, wrinkled hands.

I am not a very pleasant person, am I? Well. I just think that someone in Montreux may be writing a blog about a crap pizza and a strange, but observant guy in the restaurant, with big hair and big bags under his eyes. I had better be careful if I go back to the UK - apprently the government are going to tax supermarkets who give away shopping bags, 'willy-nilly' to cutomers. I have to hope that they don't catch up with me and see my sagging eyes as a revenue opportunity. Bugger that.

Engueta - or for viewers in the UK "Enjoy ur meaw".

It's that time of year... When a few friends feel it necessary to regale ALL the people they think are their friends about how wonderful and nuclear and solvent and academic their families are. All this festive syrup is contained on a cheap, thin piece of inkjet-printed A4 paper, stuffed into their Christmas card - with, of course, a second class stamp stuck on the envelope and 'posted in good time'. These are organized people...

You know the sort of thing. The letter follows a familiar form:

"Happy Christmas to one and all!!

Husband Bob has been terribly busy, which makes him very tired. But was promoted again this year and we are looking forward to his bonus :-)))))). I am keeping out of trouble with tennis lessons, the WI and a part time job at the local solicitors' office. Son Tarquin looks like he will get a double first from OXFORD. All he does is work, it seems, poor lad! Daughter Annabel is lovely and has such a wonderful social life."

When actually the letter should say something along the lines of:

"Bob farts incessantly, never shaves at the weekend, is a brief and inadequate lover and he's really getting on my tits. If it wasn't for the fat pay cheque - or for the fact that the tennis coach is married (and in love, would you believe???!!!) - I would leave the fat, farting bastard tomorrow.

Tarquin is a lazy little long-haired bugger. We had to fight like hell to stop him being thrown out of that third-rate shit-hole "Oxford Brooks" - a place that has the nerve to call itself a university. Ha ha. :-(. God knows - Tarquas hardly seems employable at the moment; smacked out of his tree, or drunk, or both - most of the time. And NEVER bothers to call home, even though we pay his extortionate mobile phone bill for him. Ungrateful waster.

Annabel is a slut and shags anything that moves. Men have stopped looking at me in the street and just drool at her. Little tart. And we suspect she is running the amphetamine and vice business in Croydon. At least she shows some evidence of a blossoming business acumen, bless her.

Happy Christmas? Probably not."

I am thinking of doing my own round-robin this year - so watch this space....

And sorry if you are someone who does write these letters, but hopefully you will now think twice about embarking on your odious annual holier-than-thou epistles to the unwashed no-hopers who you like to call friends. We could all do without them from now on. If you want to write something, write it - to each person - and ask them how they are, rather than be 100% on transmit. For me, this year. No cards, no cheap pieces of A4. Instead, I shall be buying some goats for families in Ethiopia via a dodgy website. Hopefully, the recipients will have some tasty recipes for cooking the pesky critters.

They can be tough when they get a little old.

And so can the goats.

Happy festiveness.

Pigging-out at swine Eat-a-thon

Wednesday was pig and sausage day - well some of it was...

The Neu Hausli (pronounced 'Noy Hoosley') Restaurant in Waedenswil offers a 'Metzger Menu' (butcher's menu) which consists entirely of pork dishes. And I do feel a bit guilty, having written at length about fat Americans, to now be writing in praise of an eating event that encourages excess.

There are 14 dishes to choose from - which, if nothing else - proves that you can eat every bit of a pig, except its squeak.

The six course 'menu' seemed to be a good idea and course one was a bean soup with leaks, followed by blood sausage, flavoured with cinnamon. Sounds odd, tastes great. Course three was a sausage (another one) containing mashed (pig) liver. It was a strange grey colour and looked like something you might 'rod' out of a blocked drain. However it tasted much better than it looked - flavoured with herbs and accompanied by sauerkraut.

A quick swig of ice-cold vodka followed - apparently as a 'digestif' - to you and me this means it is designed to cut through the fat you'd just jammed down your gullet.

Onwards and upwards - a plate of very thinly-sliced liver arrived - I think it was fried in butter, but I am told it was cooked in oil.

Then into the smoked pig - first 'speck', which is a thick slice of back bacon served with re-hydrated green string beans, followed by 'rippli' which is ham, served warm, with two slices of apple that seemed to have been sitting in some sort of liqueur.

And finally 'gnaggi' which apparently is the lower end of the pig's foreleg. Quite fatty, but the meat near the bone was so succulent it melted in your mouth.

By this point I was full. Strange, I know. So full that I refused the deep-fried, battered apple slices with vanilla sauce. And the numerate will have noticed that the six-course menu ended up being eight courses, even though I refused the last fence for fear of exploding.

All of this should be accompanied by beer, but we decided to polish-off a few bottles of Rioja - seemed to work as well as beer for me...

Then pfluemli - a plum-based liqueur served in hot water with sugar. Dangerous thing a 'pfluemli' because it doesn't really taste like it contains alcohol. And finally coffee.

Thanks to Markus and Eva Baumann, my fantastic neighbours, for inviting me - it was a great evening.

America is fascinating, flabtastic

Raleigh, North Carolina, USA


I have just finished breakfast of one omlette, two pieces of toast, some sort of flat-bread-pattie-thingy and two cups of repulsive coffee. In the process of scoffing this lot, I was fascinated that I had amassed 16 separate pieces of packaging waste.

This is bad - not least because I hate eating anything out of plastic.

And then I looked around the restaurant and saw the mass of flabby humanity tucking into huge plates, piled high with: bacon (3x thickness of Swiss bacon), sausages, grits, eggs, toast, muffins, ketchup, cheese, bagels brimming with cream cheese, sugar-sprinkled waffles the size of truck tyres, pancakes swimming in maple syrup and cubes of roasted potatoes. Some of these good folk were so fat, they got their backsides wedged into their chairs. You could have got two of me sitting side-by-side in one chair - and my arse is not so small.

Some of the men's bellies were so large and round that they had to belt their jeans up under their armpits - any lower and the belt would have been on the downward slope and their trousers would have fallen down. And one woman's flab started just below her ears and gently sloped out and down for several feet before coming back up and in just above the top of her legs, which were clad in a fetching pair of bright pink trackie bottoms.

And after breakfast I wanted to take a stroll, but was warned not to by the friendly receptionist. She told me: [1] There are no sidewalks, [2] the traffic is heavy and dangerous so i should not walk along the pavement (road to you and me) and [3] - don't go into the woods without a dayglow orange baseball cap because it's huntin' season and there will be guys out there blasting away at anything that looks like a deer... Apparently my salt and pepper grey hair is the same colour as the species of deer around here and some of the guys only need a hint of movement in the undergrowth before they unleash several rounds of rifled shotgun slugs into a bush. Holy crap.

So, lots of fatty food and no chance of a spot of light exercise for fear of being run-over or shot. Not healthy. Surely there should be a law against shooting people who are not morbidly obese - or at least a defined season for hunting the overweight. A 'Fat Hunt', of sorts...

This phenomenon - of fatness and the aggressively anti-exercise environment I found myself in, so fascinated me that I looked up the Center for Disease Control website, the US medical authority, to see if they had any pearls of wisdom. But apart from stats and maps of obesity in the country and learned papers on fatness in the US, they failed to mention in plain English that the reason people here are fat is because they eat too much of the wrong foods and don't exercise. The nearest the CDC gets to this is, and I quote:

"Whether you want to lose weight or maintain a healthy weight, it’s important to understand the connection between the calories your body takes in (through the foods you eat and the beverages you drink) and the calories your body uses (through normal body functions, daily activities, and physical activity)".

Still awake? Normal bodily functions - does this mean we should all consciously remember to go for a dump; set it up as a daily reminder on our mobiles? Daily activities - can you lose more weight watching baseball or American football on TV? We should be told.

I fear for this country - and not just because of its all-pervading, rabid religious extremism and neo-conservatism. Nor because of its interesting foreign policy. Obesity will do this nation in...it is the threat within.