'Might have been the tap water', friends report

Stephen Baxter, an Egyptologist who has never eaten at any 'Western' fast food restaurants on any of his numerous visits to Egypt in the past seventeen years, was recovering yesterday from four days of violent vomiting and diarrhoea, in which - he reported - he 'must have lost three stones in weight'. Baxter was also reported to have refused an offer from a friend to bring food from the Pizza Hut restaurant adjacent to his Cairo Hotel. His instructions, offered urgently in short bursts occupying the brief periods of respite between the rhythmic spasms of his anal and pyloric sphincters, were instead to visit a kushari 'joint' seven blocks from the hotel, which had been well reviewed on a website for independent travellers to the city some three months earlier. A friend of Baxter told egyptastic.co.uk that the most likely cause of his latest illness lay in his habit of eating what he refers to as 'streetfood' and drinking the tap water throughout his time in the country, a decision he has defended in the past on a blog that he maintains. An entry there states in part: 'I object so strongly to the cultural hegemony embodied by the golden arches.. ..I'd rather spend a day shitting through the eye of a needle than drink one of their milkshakes'.

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