Slow eating?

Did you hear about the speed-eating champion from Japan? Takeru Kobayashi, 29, has been blowing away the competition for years, hoovering up hot dogs, rice balls and cow brains in record time. But all that guzzling recently caught up with the man some describe as the Tiger Woods of speed-eating. He has developed arthritis of the jaw, which I suppose is the same as Roger Federer coming down with tennis elbow. Last week he lost his crown to a rival from (where else?) the United States.

What is a slow city?

I’ve just arrived in Lisbon to give a talk to a group of business people. My hotel is in the Bairro Alto, the old quarter where narrow, cobbled streets trickle live rivulets of water down the hill to the sea. It is hard to get anywhere in a hurry, and you wouldn’t want to anyway because the architecture is so beautiful. It’s all a million miles from so much of North America, where the roads are laid out so that cars can hurtle through, and the functional, disposable buildings offer nothing to arrest the eye or make you want to linger. When it comes to slowing down, Europeans, with their wonderful, old cities, definitely have an advantage…Now I’d better hurry up and rehearse my speech….