Daily shrimp count: Low

[ailbhe]

I saw the hotel doctor yesterday for a dodgy tum who said that it's probably nothing but there is gastric flu going around so it could be that. He gave me lots of advice which would be easy to follow at home, but in a hotel isn't particularly useful. He also told me to eat a bland diet but there's a dairy-free vegetable curry on this evening so that's not going to happen.

The weather continues charming - it's bleak and grey and windy, which gives us an excellent excuse to stay in the hotel drinking tea and eating biscuits. Oh, we swim, too, in the 34C pool. It's very like a big bath with a jacuzzi at the side; Linnea likes to push Rob off the edge of the jacuzzi and into the pool.

A suite is the way to go, folks. This is the best free upgrade experience I have ever had. We can sit around geeking with the "free" broadband while Linnea naps in the room next door.

And the lobby cafe serves fantastic mulled wine.

We haven't seen much. the best archaeological sites aren't open to children under 5 for reasons of preservation, and I'm not much interested in the architecture in general. So we've mainly stayed where we are. It's possible that we'll take a day-trip to Gozo, to see some greenery, if the weather improves. Malta is incredibly built up. It's one big suburb with a few small towns in it.

People speak English to their children, and many children are growing up unable to speak Malti fluently. They get a lot of English and Italian television, and many young parents see Malti as a language for poor people which will hold people back. This all sounds very familiar to me...

The hotel is lovely and well-staffed, but they have serious problems with the dairy issue. All the food, all the time, is covered in butter. The vegetables are buttered to keep them moist while they sit around in bain maries, the meats are glazed with milk, the salads are topped with parmesan, the soups are enriched with cream. I'm beginning to feel like a nag and a whinger, but I will not feed Linnea food which might contain dairy. We tried that, it made her ill, we're not doing it again for a long time.

Dairy-free desserts seem to cause almost total brain atrophy on the part of the chefs - fruit salad is the obvious offering, but that gets incredibly boring very fast. The other two samples of the pastry-chef's art we've seen so far are apple crumble (made in a ramekin, with caramelised sugar and crumble so thick I had difficulty breaking the crust and Linnea couldn't eat it at all) and caramelised pineapple, which was mainly fantastic for being served with a selection of delicious berry fruits I couldn't identify but was more than capable of eating.