Last week we took our friend Lina to the small Walloon town of Dinant. It is a beautiful little town situated on the River Meuse, featuring a citadel accessible by cable-car, allowing us to look down over its onion-domed Collegiale Notre-Dame (Church of Our Lady). Dinant is also the birthplace of Adolphe Sax, who invented the saxophone, and the couque, Europe’s hardest biscuit. We bought a few tiny sticks of the honey-flavoured couques to try, and they were very delicious, if a little difficult to consume.

While we were there, we also discovered that today was the day of the annual pie-eating contest. I looked it up on my iPhone and discovered that the record stood at fourteen. Wow, we thought, fourteen pies in fourty-five minutes. That is impressive. The pies were like quiches, and called flamische, as they were cooked over the flames. The Confrérie des Quarteniers de la Flamiche Dinantaise (Brotherhood of the Officers of the Dinant Flamische) assembled on stage, the choir began to sing, and the competition began. We quickly realised that the record was fourteen slices, not fourteen pies. And why was this number so low? Because the men insisted on using their knives and forks, pausing between mouthfuls to enjoy a glass of burgundy wine and to answer questions over the microphone. Even in an eating competition, the European instinct was to savour every mouthful. All the contestants simply ate until they were full, then pushed back their plates and watched the others with a smile. No records for gluttony were broken in Dinant that day.