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W.

W. Empire pod UK.com. From the Viceroy to young Clark who at home consumes high tea at sunset, every Englishman in

India solemnly dresses for dinner.

It is as though the integrity of the British Empire depended in some directly magical way upon the donning of black jackets and hard-boiled shirts.

Solitary men in dach bungalows, on coasting steamers and little shanties among tiger-infested woods obey the mystical imperative

every evening of putting on the funereal uniform of English prestige.

Almost more amazing is the other great convention of keeping up European prestige, the convention of eating too much.

Five meals a day, two breakfast, luncheon, afternoon tea and dinner, a standard throughout

India. A sixth is often added in the big towns where there are

theatres and dances to justify late supper. The Indian who eats at most two meals a day,

sometimes only one too often none, is compelled to acknowledge his inferiority.

Perhaps the Indians can only be impressed by our gastronomic prowess.

Our prestige is bound up with overeating.

For the sake of empire, the truly patriotic tourist will sacrifice his liver and his colon,

will pave the way for future apoplexes and cancers of the intestine. I did my best while I was in India, but at the risk of undermining our prestige of bringing the whole imperial

fabric in ruins about my ears, I used from time to time, unobtrusively to skip, of course. The spirit is willing, but the flesh, alas, is weak.

That's wonderful. Who said that?

Olders Huxley, one of my favourite travel diaries of all time, little known and now out of print but it's

called Jesting Pilot their diary of a journey and it's published in about 1924 and

...