At a party not so long ago, a friend told me that she was about to leave. “I’m hungry,” she said, her eyes sliding towards the coats. “I’m going home for a bowl of Weetabix.” I greeted this with some surprise, if not outright derision. Wouldn’t she prefer a pizza with me? But already she was entering an ecstatic state. “Weetabix is lovely,” she went on. “Sugar, cold milk … ” Half a century of eating the stuff had taught her the optimum point at which to devour it, a fleeting moment she could judge by sight. Its biscuit-dryness had to be gone, but it needed to be soft rather than soggy. Her eyes half closed, she wantonly mimed pushing a spoon into this late-night ambrosia.
I thought of this the other day, when Alan Titchmarsh, TV gardener and aspirant steamy novelist, informed the nation it should stop eating avocados on the grounds of their environmental impact (to summarise: many of those sold in the UK are grown on land that was formerly rainforest; their cultivation involves huge amounts of water in places where it’s scarce; they must be shipped 5,000 miles or more to reach us). “There’s a lot to be said for cornflakes, Weetabix and Shreddies,” he announced, deploying the homely tartness that made him such a hit on Pebble Mill and Ground Force to deal with the 21st-century hipster breakfast of choice. Ha! Next time my friend refused a dinner date on the grounds that she would rather commune with a bowl of cereal, I would have no choice but to mention him. Several times. In my best (native) Yorkshire accent.
To be serious, though, there is a circle here – for me, and perhaps for you. Titchmarsh’s edict, a statement to which the Times devoted a leader column, plots the story of our lives in breakfasts. Once, after all, it was so simple: cereal, toast and tea came as standard; a full English was a treat if you were away for the weekend. But then, eggs benedict having already mounted its gooey putsch, about a decade ago things turned fully shakshuka. If it sounds spoilt to talk of the tyranny of choice in the context of breakfast, all I can say is don’t you always feel slightly anxious when you utter the words “just toast, please” at a hotel, as if you’re somehow letting down your waiter?
In my childhood, breakfast was only ever toast. Cereal was eaten first thing by kids in TV ads, but in our house it was reserved for post-school hunger, to be consumed in the moments between taking off your coat and Grange Hill. Avocados, of course, were highly exotic, even rare: in restaurants, they were the starter that succeeded (after decades) fruit juice or half a grapefruit. Did this exoticism lie behind the sudden craze, in the early 1980s, for avocado bathroom suites? I’ve always wondered about this. But either way, according to memory, they tasted much better then – by which I mean that they tasted of something, even if it was only the olive oil you lugged home from France in the Datsun and a little light social progress.
When I was a student, I rarely ate breakfast: if I was up early enough for there to be a wait for lunch, a Mars bar would do it (I was like Prof Tim delay-your-breakfast-for-the-sake-of-your-gut Spector avant la lettre). In my twenties, I ate bad Danish pastries that were delivered to our desks in the newsroom via a trolley as compensation for the fact that we were indentured. My thirties were the restaurant years, when I spent far too much on what was by now called brunch. My forties, when I was newly and happily married, was the era of devotedly making bacon sandwiches for my beloved (OK, I still do this). And now, here we are, preparing to cancel avocados.
Personally, I won’t be bereft; I never got with the programme so far as smashing them goes. Yet still I salute their unlikely journey. In their huge stones, knobbly skins and propensity for causing hand injuries, I see an island nation desperately seeking sophistication. To pinch from TS Eliot, in our beginning is our end. In succession, breakfast dishes rise and fall. We turn back now to our Weetabix gratefully, tasting its particular nothingness afresh.
