John Cleese has railed against the “Lazy, fat, beer-sodden, pseudo-French Belgian bastards” who failed to show sufficient enthusiasm at a recent gig in Hasselt, an inoffensive medieval city in Limburg province with the misfortune to have a stadium large enough to accommodate him.

I can’t work out if this was post-bad-gig petulance, Clarkson-lite banter or genuine antipathy to Belgium as the cradle of the EU, given that Cleese is a member of Artists 4 Brexit, declaring he “doesn’t want to be ruled by a bunch of European bureaucrats”. Regardless, he is wrong. And not just because Hasselt is Dutch-speaking (he later corrected his tweet to “pseudo-Dutch”, which is at least linguistically accurate).

I feel obliged to defend Belgium’s honour, as a non-Belgian but long-time resident of this small, strange country. The fact that I am about to leave after 12 years has only fanned the flames of my outrage. I am already viewing Belgium and Belgians with tearful, rose-tinted nostalgia. My surreal encounters with local administration, the time the post office ran out of stamps (actually, the post office generally) and run-ins with my saxophonist neighbour are all forgotten. From Simenon to Stromae, this place and its people are perfect (and they were doing surrealism long before Monty Python, incidentally).

Let me crush Cleese’s calumnies in turn.

John Cleese performing in 2016. Photograph: Koen van Weel/EPA

Lazy? It seems a bit misguided to start throwing this one around as the Red Devils, Belgium’s astonishingly successful football team, start their World Cup campaign. The Devils – who at their best are fast, fluid and a delight to watch – have been described as “genuine challengers” for this summer’s title. Just wait until they are dancing elegant rings around England next Thursday and then tell me Belgians are lazy, John.

Then there’s heptathlete Nafi Thiam, the spectacular 6ft superwoman who stole Jessica Ennis-Hill’s crown at the Rio Olympics. And what about cycling? Take any road on any weekend in Belgium and you will meet a terrifying onslaught of not just Mamils (middle-aged men in Lycra), but every demographic, peddling furiously through their conveniently flat land. Also, wasn’t this a comedy gig? What exactly was Cleese hoping for – a spontaneous outbreak of high-intensity circuit training between gags?

Fat? Is it possible to get fat in Belgium? Emphatically, yes. After my first summer job here, I waddled back to England nearly a stone heavier from gorging on pralines for pennies, triple-cooked chips and face-sized waffles covered in chocolate sauce. Belgium is a place of magnificent indulgence, where no coffee comes without its speculoos biscuit, no beer without its selection of savoury nibbles. In 2014, a petition was even launched to have the Belgian frite recognised as Unesco cultural heritage; the fritkot – the traditional shack where a usually irascible man slathers one of 95 pale pink sauces on to a giant cone of frites whilst possibly also frying you a puck of grey mystery meat – won that status nationally in 2017. Even so, Belgian obesity rates are below the EU average: four points lower than the UK’s men, nine lower for women. Admittedly these figures are provided by Eurostat, “a bunch of European bureaucrats” par excellence.

A Belgian ‘fritkot’ Photograph: Studio Moto Brussels

Anecdotally, however, I can assure Cleese that most Belgians – and especially Flemish Belgians (such as the ones he would have encountered in Hasselt) – of my acquaintance are tall, slim Übermenschen: their calves rope-like knots of muscle from all that cycling, hair lustrous, eyes bright. Flemish cities are inspiringly progressive places: a paradise of bikes lanes, community compost heaps and organic allotments. Ghent introduced a meat-free day way back in 2009.

And the beer-swilling? I must concede this one. My first boss here in Brussels reportedly insisted on a personal beer fridge rider in his contract when he joined the firm. Beer is served at office seminars, in soft-play centres and school fetes. But in 2018 when everything, literally everything, is a flaming heap of refuse, would you begrudge us a little hop-based comfort?

You are probably wondering why I, a non-Belgian, am defending a country that isn’t even mine. Shouldn’t a Belgian be doing this? I think it’s because Belgians don’t really care. Responses to Cleese’s tweet were mainly jokey: “The one exciting thing that happened to us this year was to be insulted by you,” wrote one. Another declared herself “honoured and proud”. A sense of huffy national pride is utterly alien to the Belgian psyche: it’s one of the things I love best about this place. Their country may be the butt of jokes across Europe, but Belgians are too busy eating small biscuits and drinking beer to mind. This is why Belgium needs people like me to defend its honour: cut this wonderful, surreal, underrated land and I will bleed – fatty, beery blood.

• Emma Beddington is a freelance writer