Mock the Poncy Anglophile Week (4)

Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (q.v.), p. 87:

In Liège, I booked in [at] the Holiday Inn, a concrete block which hovered on the outskirts of the town, seemingly fearful of entering its medieval centre and keenly nostalgic for the architecture of Detroit or Atlanta. In the evening, I ordered a breaded chicken escalope from room service, and ate it whilst sitting on my bed, reading a book on the history of art in the Low Countries. Some time past midnight, I began watching a television program made up of a rolling succession of illustrated personal ads submitted by members of the public, including a baker from Charleroi who was on the lookout for l’amour et un peu plus, a program which continued for several hours deep into an insomniac night and revealed levels of longing that I had not until then suspected from my brief exchanges in this small and fractured nation [Belgium].