Vous achetez quelque chose pour la douleur Monsieur?

After another day in the Brussels office, me and my Spanish colleague retired to the De Valera pub to watch Fulham take on bitter rivals Chelsea in the SW6 derby.

But when we got there…..

A quiet word with the bar staff and the problem was rectified.

And then the unbelievable happened.

Amazingly Fulham won 2-1 – four wins in a row. The walk back to the hotel was surprisingly quiet – the result clearly didn’t rock Brussels. But I did my best to wake up the neighbourhood – Come on You Whites!!!!

I had to go Brussels for a work trip for a couple of days. My colleague and I took the train direct from Lyon and arrived in time for lunch.

Euronews’ office is near the European Commission building so we took in some of the sites.

After work it was time for dinner – we only had one thing on our minds.

Today there was another pot at work to welcome everyone back for the new year.

And of course this time it featured une tranche de galette des rois but this time avec un verre de cidre.

Ma prof sera contente parce qu’elle m’a toujours dit qu’il faut manger les galettes avec un verre de cidre. Et maintenant je l’ai fait.

The other job of the weekend was to take down and recycle our sapin- our Christmas tree.

When we got the tree we also bought a charity bag to recycle it in.

It makes the job a lot easier – very few pine needles in the flat.

Then it was a short trip to our nearest recycling point for it to join the other sapins at the end of their Christmas shift.

It is 6 January – the epiphany, when the three wise men visited Jesus. The day is marked in France unsurprisingly by the sale of patisserie.

Galettes des rois and galettes des reines are sold in all the bakereries.

So of course we bought one.

As you can see it comes with a crown – to be worn by the lucky person who finds the charm inside the cake – la feve.

Cath saw that our favourite village in the Beaujolais region was having a display of Christmas crèches. But today was the last day – so off we went.

I’m glad we did but a word of warning – there were a lot of them. Below are some of the best.