Food

I have been contemplating writing about how I managed to lose ten pounds in January of this year and keep them off, but as I've weighed myself and discovered I've gained three pounds overnight, I'm going to be a bit cautious. Hopefully if I don't spend all of this week drinking champagne and eating marshmallows I can shed some weight again.

We woke early today, dismayed to discover we still had a huge amount of food to eat. In the end we had to get rid of some of the sausages, which was a sad and shameful thing to have to do, but we couldn't face the thought of carting them back out again. Then we took a sampan all the way back to Sai Kung, avoiding the hassles of multiple buses, boats and hiking.

This was very necessary as we were all quite broken, whether it was from the hike or from dragging pieces of dead tree down to the beach for the bonfire. So when we got into Sai Kung and had our second or third breakfast of the day it was a welcome pause, but a great struggle to rise again from our table and head homewards. Having spent this weekend eating sausages, chips, baguettes and omelettes, we've completely avoided any Asian food, so we're going to rectify this with Vietnamese at Locomotive tonight.

Locomotive is so named because it's based on food from a hawker stall at a Vietnamese railway station. It's fortunate it was a Vietnamese railway station - beef soup, noodles, fried rice - rather than an English railway station canteen - plastic wrapped cheese rolls, microwaved meat pies, soft porn magazines. Although I guess it would be simpler to cook.

And that's an unfair characterisation of the food available in British railway stations now. I mean, some of them have vending machines so you could add a Twix to the hypothetical menu, or one of those Delifrance that have 'French' pastries that never exist in France. (Or do they? Perhaps Parisians love dried up pastry injected with pureed mushrooms and cheese just as much as Londoners do.) There's even, these days, the possibility for a Krispy Kreme - another of the staples of Great British Food.

Have I been away too long?

Or have I just been awake too long today?