It’s a bank holiday

So there’s time for breakfast. Eggs, naturally. Then there’s the optional items: sausages, bacon, there’s a little remaining black pudding. Tomatoes (fresh or tinned (or both?)), mushrooms, beans. There’s no leftover mash and cabbage, so there’ll be no bubble. Bread: fried, toast, or simply spread with real butter. Tea, coffee, orange juice? Any two from- or all three? BLISS, having walked the dogs early, is ‘treating’ herself to an extra Weetabix. Weird as that is, it isn’t as weird as some breakfast habits. I don’t understand having sweet stuff at breakfast. Given the option of croissants (stuffed with chocolate or otherwise), Danish pastries and the like, or nothing, I’ll take the nothing option. I wonder how many of the lifestyle police working their righteous indignation up towards banning the full English on artery-clogging grounds are happy to get stuck into a cake in the morning, the oddballs.

There’s just some trimmings to top things off. A book, ‘Skagboys’; music: Lee Konitz Live at Birdland; Arseblog, and Le Grove (of course, along with all other things right and proper, we’re Arsenal in these parts). Salt on the eggs, sparingly applied. Brown sauce (I’m not anal about it, but I’m glad it’s HP). The sausages preferably butchers’, the bacon preferably English but certainly not Danish, the eggs free range (from all of two doors away, how’s that for reducing food miles). There’s an anti-Danish thing here: don’t like their pastries (as sweet stuff for breakfast is unnatural and very, very wrong); won’t have the bacon on animal welfare grounds.

You get the smells, the cooking time provides some tension and anticipation, the timing has to be spot on, then there's the first burst of brilliant yellow yolk smeared over a slice of sausage speared along with a mushroom on the fork, bread in the other hand, steam rising from the coffee cup. Don't get that with cornflakes, or petit pain au chocolat, ya great nance.