Breakfast

Breakfast arrives on a tray sometime around 7 am; the items on the tray match those chosen from the breakfast menu listing.

In keeping with the New Street credo, it is simple.  Eggs Benedict, porridge with coconut and quinoa and that darling of hipster cafes, smashed avocado on toast, will never appear on the New Street breakfast menu.

The chosen items appearing on my daily breakfast tray are fruit juice, cereal, toast and tea. 

The fruit juice is usually a hybrid: little bit of this and not too much of that with the main contenders apple and orange.  This fruit juice, of whatever combination, is served at very meal and appears to be a replacement for fresh fruit; a tentative request for an orange was met with a response suggesting a search party would be sent out to procure one and the degree of difficulty involved would be at the upper end of the difficulty scale.

Ticking the box for the cereal section of the menu was a considered decision between porridge, it is after all the middle of winter, and a standard selection of summer fare. I opt for cornflakes over porridge; the thought of badly cooked porridge is a risk I am not prepared to take.  The cornflakes are of a generic variety and there is very little that can be done to ruin them. Or that was my hope for the following week….

Toast is two slices of bread, faintly coloured and warm, buttered and accompanied by a sachet or two of jam.  The faint colouring of the toast immediately brings to mind the response of my paternal grandfather, a man of short-temper and very definite ideas about the rules of toast-making.  Bread, which was not of the required degree of colour, was flung back across the table together a snort of disgust and the retort ‘Boarding house toast!’

There will be no throwing of toast on my part; in less than a week the toast colour decision will be in my control.  I can wait.

And the tea.  What can I say about the tea?  Nothing positive.

However, having all of the above delivered to my room each morning allows me the luxury of  watching the morning television breakfast programs, eating breakfast and going back to bed for more healing sleep.

The good life.