As the 10am queue winds out of the Breakfast Club in Shoreditch, a flurry of bright young things in blood-restricting trousers order pancakes, huevos rancheros and flat whites. Elsewhere in the country, Brits stand in kitchens fumbling with Nespresso cartridges, munching bespoke organic muesli with live yoghurt, blueberries and honey from chipper, ethically kept bees. "Can you do breakfast?" one's cockiest, most focused clients will suggest, before appearing at 8am with a smug post-Ashtanga glow and ordering Rooibos tea and an egg-white omelette.
Somehow, in defiance of centuries of dour social conditioning, we Brits let breakfast get sexy. It certainly wasn't always thus. My clearest childhood memories are of 70s breakfasts which were silent, tasteless and compulsory. "A car cannot move without fuel in the engine," I can hear my mother chuntering as I stare at a bowl of tepid Ready Brek ("Central Heating for Kids") or two slices of Mother's Pride toast with Co-op marge and a watery poached egg. Soggy Weetabix. Creamy tea with full-fat milk. Never ever coffee, which was a mystery to us, although a tin of Camp Chicory & Coffee Essence did live in the cupboard for more than a decade, with me and my brothers occasionally feeding each other spoonfuls for a dare.
Nearby, at my gran's house in Carlisle, breakfast was an even more serious, regimented matter. Gran set the table for the next day's breakfast at 9.30 every single evening of a 60-year marriage while she made my grandfather his pre-bed supper (two slices of cheddar and a buttered Jacob's cream cracker, if you're interested). Breakfast wasn't "eaten" it was "got across your chest", a fried culinary flak jacket of bacon, fried eggs, toast with butter, slices of black pudding, an abstemious blob of HP Sauce. My grandad would have all that down his gullet by 7.15am and would be up a ladder doing something perilous with guttering by 7.35. Foodwise, like most Brits back then, they glorified in non-adventure. Pasta, noodles, curry or pizza – all of which I'm guilty of breakfasting on – had never passed their lips. I'm not sure what grandad would make of my French-style patisserie breakfasts from Paul – croque monsieur with a double espresso and a bottle of Vitaminwater – but he would probably be bewildered, moving quickly to scathing. He was once hoodwinked into eating a mouthful of quiche Lorraine at a family party in the 80s, mistaking it for custard tart, an experience he seemed to find as traumatic as being shot at in the battle of Monte Cassino.
It was the rise of the package holiday in the late 80s and early 90s that made us Brits loosen up about breakfast. The Dents ventured to Estartit on the Costa Brava (20 hours on a coach, we didn't trust planes, nasty business). Our minds were collectively blown by the concept of yoghurt for breakfast, cold meats, breakfast doughnuts and orange juice poured willy-nilly (back home it doubled as a formal starter for a posh dinner). We discovered Nutella – actual spready chocolate to go on toast.
Other families must have had similar early morning epiphanies because they began tearing down portions of their sombre kitchens and hammering up American-style "breakfast bars", complete with portable tellies to watch Anne Diamond and Nick Owen on Good Morning Britain. My mother certainly dreamed of something similar and openly fantasised about which one of the children she could have adopted in order to make room for nine feet of MFI'd speckled faux-granite laminate and four tall stools, on which she could perch breakfasting on peach Ski yoghurt, drinking Mellow Bird's with Carnation evaporated milk and being, in a lot of ways like Heather Locklear from Dynasty, but living in Currock, Carlisle.
Although in the 80s we may have briefly turned our backs on the great British fried breakfast – claiming to prefer half a grapefruit and an aerobic crunch through the Arlene Phillips' Keep in Shape System – the full gut-buster remained close to our hearts. By the 90s, as well as lapping up Liam, Damon, Loaded lads and all other things beautifully British, we seemed to revisit the full English with a jingoistic fervour. Set meal B with extra bubble and white toast became the final hoorah in any big night of debauchery. The Naked Chef taught us how to make pukka bacon sandwiches while propping up a Vespa scooter at the same time. In London, we saw the rise of the first mega-bucks English breakfasts and I fed my growing waistline with £20 plates of Cumberland sausage, organic goose eggs, homemade baked beans, hash browns, portobello mushrooms and endless granary toast with lightly salted butter, served with cafetieres of freshly brewed coffee.
Oh the coffee. Suddenly good coffee was everywhere, on every corner. Plentiful 7am supplies of latte, Americano, espresso, cappuccino. We took cheap flights to New York and came home demanding fancy coffee and bagels smothered with smoked salmon and cream cheese. Smoked salmon for breakfast? I can hear my grandfather spinning in his grave. He'd have been happy with humble kipper, perhaps on a very special occasion, or if a guesthouse landlady offered it during a trip to Blackpool. But smoked salmon on any old day breakfast? Unthinkable.
What I also loved about the 90s was how breakfast began to be a whole other social and working occasion. Previously, breakfast was a private, indoors time to be spent with the bed clad in a mixed-fibres dressing gown, while grunting in response to requests from your nearest and dearest to pass the jam. Suddenly, invites from your zippiest, most high-flying (translation: bloody annoying) colleagues and clients to "do breakfast" began appearing in your new-fangled "electronic mail in-box". You'd arrive at 8am in a cafe with a pillow-creased face and sleep snot eyes to find them primed like a tiger, still wearing their spinning class headband, souped up on a litre of Kenco, having already transferred their thoughts to Powerpoint and "actioned several blue sky targets". The approach was – and remains – to order eggs Benedict and let them twaddle on until their inevitable caffeine crash.
Yet there's a beauty in the new ways we British do breakfast. We've escaped from our kitchens and sofas and embraced breezy brunches and breakfast working meetings. I might laugh at the large tables of kids at the Breakfast Club with their plates of green eggs and ham or chorizo hash browns, updating their Tumblr sites and planning new directional haircuts, but deep down I'm thoroughly envious. This generation has never faced a tepid bowl of Scott's Porage Oats made with water, milk and salt while Radio 1's Dave Lee Travis burbled in the background. Nor have they known the pant-wetting excitement of a Kellogg's multipack (the same boring cereal, just smaller). No, it's 2012, they're just having a ball at breakfast time, laughing, carousing, flirting, working and feasting wantonly on foodstuffs from every corner of the world. I can't beat them so I join them. The great British breakfast will never stand still, as sure as eggs is eggs.
