The news that Mrs Margaret Thatcher takes vitamin pills and a glass of mineral water for breakfast could signal the end of that noble institution, the British breakfast.
It also sends a chill clean down the egg-stained dressing-gowns of all those who love the leisurely breakfast, the panoply of salt and pepper, the volcanic toss of the pop-up toaster, and the yellow coagulation of marmalade squelched from the jar and dripped from the knife.
This culinary curtain raiser to the stressful day will not be surrendered easily.
There are those who will defend the bastion of breakfast to the last serviette, to the last plastic tablecloth, sand bagging themselves behind a terrace of teabags and resisting to the ultimate crust.
People are always boasting about a cup of coffee for breakfast, or how they start the day with orange juice; they are usually mean, angular people or they are people who are too damn late getting out of bed, sloppy in their dress, never burnishing their shoes and always rushing off to the train, gnawing health biscuits with the consistency of old bath room tiles.
I recently sat opposite a woman munching celery. It sounded like the breaking of bones and the snapping of limbs. She wore the sanctified look of denial of that pain-in the-neck multitude—the people who go without.
Later in the day she would be biscuit dipping around the morning tea club, snapping at callers, or secretly munching apples, her whole system thrown into disarray by the non-breakfast syndrome.
There is also the jogger, the fibre-mad mugger of breakfast food, who searches my chin for signs of egg each morning or plants an accusing finger on the butter stain on my left lapel.
Breakfast (and particularly Saturday morning breakfast) remains one of the last strongholds of sanity; a bower of egg and bacon where one retreats behind the Crossquiz; where pots of conserve sit rosy-sided in the morning light that streams through the window; where one’s toes curl in their slippers by the one-bar radiator.
Breakfast, glorious breakfast. One can even take a tray to the Fair One who is still reading in bed. These days she’s a dry-biscuit-with-Vegemite-dab freak but there was a time one could set a tray for her with toast and tea and a boiled egg, nestling in its cup and even with a small woollen egg cover to keep it warm and the yolk yellow and fluid.
Oh the joy of the eggtimer, spilling its measured sands and the getting of an egg to that stage of firm white and liquid yellow, the deft cutlass-sweep of the knife to take off the top.
All a part of the breakfast scenario.
Not any more, if Margaret has her way. Women everywhere will be downing loads of vitamin pills, drinking reservoirs of mineral water and ruling us all.
Of course we deserve it. Surely, some say, this luxurious breakfast is a sign of decadent society, scrambling for eggs and saving its bacon, disregarding the good functions of the body and the uncluttering of the mind.
People come to me, quoting cholesterol as I sit relaxed in my old slippers and handling a Lacy egg, with a nicety of fork flourish and an agile tongue that can reach out and take it from the prongs like a lizard capturing a fly.
I am impervious to lectures when I’m at breakfast. Dogs can howl for walks, telephone can ring, doors can be knocked on, neighbours can come to the window mouthing pointing and sign-languaging, for admittance but I take no more notice than if they were specks on the pane.
I shall not be moved from the breakfast table until the third round of toast and the last slavering suction of the bacon rind.
My eyes flick from page to page of my It Makes Your Day morning daily. I imprint each page with a drop of grease or a sip of tea although I must admit Mrs Thatcher’s frugal repast had me spilling half a cup over the overseas news.
So I’m saying to those who will be saying to me that it’s a good idea to be frugal at breakfast, to be parsimonious for lunch and sparing for supper… nuts, phooey and more toast, baby.
If Colquhoun’s1 kids want to eat muesli, if some people say there’ll always be an all-bran, if a cup of black coffee is your kick, go to it but don’t rap on my windowpane as I loll, sleek and satisfied and make one last lunge at the marmalade.
Oh and if you happen to be writing to Mrs Thatcher in England do let her know that there is some far corner of a foreign field that is forever breakfast!
Max Fatchen