It was only to be expected really. After all, she had approached the kipper fillet from downwind – as all the text books suggest – so she wasn’t expecting me to be there, just behind the azalea with the pump-action porridge gun loaded and ready to fire.
However, she had, by then got her hands on several individual containers of marmalade and was beginning to outflank the full English breakfast. I had to act fast, bringing up all my reserves of toast (wholemeal and white), just in case she instigated a cavalry charge against the scrambled eggs.
Breakfast can be a fraught business at the best of times. I’ve known normally brave men go to pieces when faced with a shortage of coffee and women and children fleeing in terror in the face of an onslaught of kedgeree at dawn.
Still, though, when the enemy see the full English breakfast staring back at them on the plate, they begin to feel the first taste of fear, often their weak continental croissants will fall to pieces, crumbling uselessly on their side plates once the full power of those sausages, bacon and – in heavy warfare – the black pudding begin their work in earnest, even though the enemy throw all their cereals against it.
So, much throughout the long and noble story of British breakfasts has depended on that thin red line of ketchup keeping the horror of feeble continental breakfasts from our shores, and long may it continue.
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