It is extremely annoying that my camera is broken, because the bakeries here have started to sell a kind of cake that looks Exactly Like Sick, and I would love to provide photographic evidence of the true horror. Said cake is the size of a small dinner plate, or, indeed, a small puddle of spew, and has a kind of glazed streusel topping that gives it the shiny lustre of regurgitated cheese on toast.

(For some reason, I am being reminded while I blog about vomit of what Doris Lessing said about the “inanities” of the internet, but I’ll press on. By the way, I’ve read one of her books now – totally weird.)

I would like to buy a few of the cakes and leave them on pavements in a street art-cum-Jeremy Beadle prank. Mind you, I suppose people are no more likely to voluntarily tread on a cake than in a pool of drunkard’s vomit, so that little experiment would be unlikely to prove much, but at least it would bring a piece of little England to Bonn’s streets.

Speaking of chunderous activities, this part of Germany seems to be in the middle of something called Karneval. I think it’s like Pancake Day, only with fewer pancakes and more clowns. The finer detail eludes me – I’m told that various committees are set up (natch), and there’s something about female staff cutting off their manager’s tie – but in broad brushstrokes, everyone gets dressed up like an idiot and goes out on the pull. Apparently it has been going on since mid-November (can that be right, religiously speaking?), but momentum is building as we approach Shrove Tuesday. Indeed, I am beginning to notice people dressed up as Napoleon on a fairly regular basis. I think I saw a Visigoth on the train today, but that might have just been the way he was sitting.

Ah, fancy dress, organised fun and beer – truly music to my ears. Clearly your intrepid correspondent fully intends to join a local Karneval association and go out in Cologne dressed as a Prussian in the name of investigative journalism, but I had better warn you in advance that I might be busy conjugating verbs on the nights in question.

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In other news, I have been reading up a bit about Idi Amin to do some research for a possible Karneval costume after seeing an old documentary about him in the cinema and being transfixed by his face for 90 minutes. Given the spotlight by the filmmakers, he did not cover himself in glory. But I did like it when he divorced three of his wives for “not being revolutionary enough”. I believe that not being revolutionary enough is actually the second highest cited reason for marital separation in the UK (after “eating with their mouth open at the dinner table for 12 years”), so it was quite prescient from a divorce litigation point of view, really.