Clearly, sometimes it’s better not to know what you have been eating until well after the event.

Or do on this occasion and politely ask - what’s this? And then smile and pretend to mishear until you can get to an internet connection and find out the true horror of the situation.

Whatever you do - if you are an honoured guest in a reception in a far away land - it’s best not to look a gift horse in the mouth. (Maybe not the best choice of words).

AMM’s post about our trip to Kazakhstan with the Royal Philharmonic jogged my memory.

It was the speculation during the flight as to whether the captain would fly there all in one go without having to refuel. I felt this was a high risk strategy and kept telling AMM this during the flight.

Watching our passports being snaffled away by high hatted Soviet looking officials. Clearly we eventually got them back. Just.

The hotel - we travelled best part of 7000 miles for just one night - the second concert had to be cancelled due to fires raging out of control at the Black Sea venue.

Eating little spicy chicken wings in the hotel foyer, watching ‘business deals’ between local female ‘guides’ and guests.

A trip up to an ice hockey venue - Medeu. Not quite sure why this happened. The venue is allegedly the largest high mountain skating rink. But there was no ice that day. Never mind.

A visit to a Russian Orthodox church.

Straight up and down concert of tried and tested favourites. Not sure the audience were entirely paying attention - lots of smart phones in use.

The post concert reception - special guest star, the violinist Marat Bisengaliev’s Mum. Treated to a wide variety of weird wonderful dishes, including, as AMM alluded, Qarta, which you’ll often see listed as one of the top ten oddest foods in the world. Kazakh Cuisine is challenging, and seems to involve eating horse alot which seems crazy to eat your main method of transportation in the wide open Central Asian Steppes. It's akin to us tucking into a Routemaster sandwich on a daily basis.

Ingredients - Take One Horse.

Method - First take your horses rectum - the penultimate part of the animal’s digestive tract, but not the sphincter (of course). It’s scraped and scrubbed and dried in the sun, then boiled and pan-fried and served on a bed of Qazy which is a horse rib meat sausage, minimally seasoned.

It’s sometimes simmered with salt, green peppers and dill.

The flight home was very very long, especially since the toilets on the plane began to pack up somewhere over the Bosphorus.

AMM and I parted company at Stansted once we finally got back, slightly worse for wear, and as usually with our trips, trying to convince ourselves that it did actually happen.

I should point out that I do not plan to eat horses bottom again. It’s not, as so often happens, a flavour I shall bring home and add to my culinary armoury.

Hooray for adventures though

RJ