Belgian chocolate, Eurostar, and personal inadequacy

If there is one thing you can count on when you travel to Brussels, it is the presence of luxury chocolate at virtually every stage of your journey. Most hotels in Brussels are either next door to Belgian chocolate shops or they have concessions in their lobbies. The hotel I stayed in last night was one of the more basic ones - furnished with the stark simplicity of a Tokyo cubby hole - and STILL they had Neuhaus chocolate available in a vending machine next to the reception. The Eurostar terminal at Brussels has only 3 shops but one of them is a Pierre Marcolini outlet, Marcolini not just being one of the most fabulous Belgian chocolatiers alive today but also one of the hippest. Cafes serve up slivers of Leonidas with your lattes, and it is on the checkout of every canteen in every Commission building. I love going to Brussels and yes, chocolate is why. I was once a member of the Chocolate Society - a birthday present from years ago, meant as a joke but I took it scarily seriously - and in the whole year of my membership, nothing on their monthly taster menu, from the chocolate praline asparagus stems to the truffled flowers, had anything on Neuhaus Caprices et Tentations, and if you do not know what these are, then go out and buy them, right now. I admit, I am the perfect target market for this stuff. When I was twenty I was teaching English in a grammar school in Cologne and one day I saw a sign advertising a chocolate trade fair. I dumped my schoolbooks and went straight over to the exhibition hall, only to find that it was open to businesses only. Totally undeterred, I came back three days later - on the day of my twenty first birthday, in fact - dressed in a suit I had borrowed from a fellow teacher, carrying a briefcase, and I confidently signed up as the Chief Executive of Meteor Chocolates. Paid my 20DM entry fee and hey presto. Welcome to the Promised Land. I was pitched to by Lindt and Cote D'Or on their new ranges and given huge multipacks of their chocolate to take away. I upended tubs of Guylian chocolate seashells into one of the twenty or so plastic bags I had concealed in my briefcase. I picked off Bazooka bubblegum from the amazing bubblegum house that stood, splendiforously, in the middle of the exhibition hall. It was an unforgettably delirious experience. When I left, every one of my twenty bags was full. My birthday is in January, and I remember eating the very last piece of chocolate on the fifteenth of April that year, and that includes the bags of it that I took into school and used as prizes for spelling bees.Plus it took about another three months before the overpowering smell of bubblegum flavoured chocolate had finally dispersed from my room. Oh, the joy. A meeting at the OECD that I attended some years later wound up with dinner and most of it was taken up by a heated argument between me and the Austrian delegate on the virtues of Valrhona versus Montezuma. So you see, I am indefatigable around chocolate. Luckily I also have a dogged commitment to exercise, which has tended to balance out, more or less, the chocolate intake, particularly until around 3 years ago when a horrible trampoline accident which injured my knee meant I had to give up my favourite training pastime, which was boxing. Boxing burns, like, a million calories a minute, or if it doesn't then it sure as hell feels as if it does. Stopping it was traumatic, and three years on with my new foot and all the physiotherapy I am still doing to get my foot into the world of mobility, I am still some way off the giddy ninja heights of my previous exercise regime. At no time was it more painfully apparent than in my last gym session two days ago. A beefy guy walks up to the mat with a 15 kg weight and proceeds to spin it around as if it were a paperclip. I on the other hand am sweaty from the effort of standing on my toes. Result, I think to myself, as I manage, by clinging for dear life to a handrail, to get my left foot to raise itself by, oh, around half an inch. Then I look over at my fellow workout fanatic to see him balancing his 15kg weight on his head. On his flipping head. OK I could't even do it if I tried - I have a very large bushy head of curls, whereas man on the next mat has no hair at all. But still, I feel like I have failed my gym entrance exam and should slope off home to work out covertly with my sissy 3kg handweights which are gathering dust next to my bed. Oh to be as authentic a fitness freak as I am a chocolate foodie.