I’ve been enjoying a new technique for losing weight.

First, eat or drink something that does not completely agree with you, in a tropical country like Ethiopia.

Then spend three days as fluids gush from every orifice, like a three-cornered fountain in a town square.  The fever flushes and shivers last only a day, and the headaches only for two.

(It seems to defy the laws of physics that you can lose more than your own body-weight in water, but I never understood the thing about which way water swirls down a plughole at the Equator either.)

By the third day, your throat may be sore from the acidic vomit, and you may not have regained your appetite, but you’ll be a lot lighter than you were on Thursday afternoon.

We are still in a hotel, so I don’t have bathroom scales to measure the effect. But I estimate that my weight must now be slightly less than zero.

I’ll keep taking sachets of oral dehydration salts in the hope that my equilibrium will be restored.