Break That Fast

One of the remaining six pigs not taken to market last week

Breakfast is one of my favourite meals. My other two favourites are lunch and dinner. But if forced to rank them, breakfast might just make the top spot. There’s something about the very name, to be breaking a fast, self-imposed throughout the long night, which I find appealing. Provided I’m eating at a sensible time, i.e. after 8am, my appetite will have kicked in and I’ll be very ready for the first mouthful of Shreddies, accompanied of course by the initial slurp of hot tea.

It’s the comfort of the ritual probably. Breakfast should always consist of a bowl of cereal (an exception can be made if porridge is available) and one or two slices of toast bearing butter and marmalade. Not Flora. Not jam. Certainly not Marmite. And all the better if the marmalade is home-made. This morning I reached the point in the ceremony where marmalade should be spread on the buttered toast and to my horror I couldn’t find orange marmalade on any of the tables. The thin toast was rapidly cooling and if not eaten soon would become cold and unpleasant. There was a jar of shop-bought lemon-and-lime marmalade but I’d been put off this by someone remarking that it smelled like floor cleaner. (We have particularly fine-smelling floor cleaner liquids here, I suppose.) Thankfully Matt spotted on a neighbouring table a small and nearly empty jar of orange marmalade made by someone’s mother, which by a stroke of luck had just the right amount for my toast. Crisis averted.


We are fortunate enough to have yogurt-makers amongst us, who use the milk we get from the three Jerseys to create a delicious natural yogurt that appears each morning in a big metal pot, accompanied by a dish of prunes for plopping on top. Some pour yogurt on top of cereal, others take it neat. You get to see other people’s breakfast habits, not all of which are fathomable. Leonard* likes to prop his two slices of toast together in a tent formation until they’re cold before spreading anything on them. Freda* will not eat her toast and jam unless she’s covered it with a layer of salt.

The broad bean plants push their way out of the earth

On Mondays poached eggs are also available. Wednesdays there are sausages, beans, tomatoes and fried bread. But Saturdays are the most popular of all as people rarely seen before 9am emerge blinking for their weekly plate of bacon, eggs and tomatoes.

Unlike the other two meals which at Pilsdon seem to be an exercise in how quickly food can be shovelled from plate to gullet before dashing off for another cigarette (at least for the smokers amongst us), breakfast has a more leisurely air. It’s the only meal which people are not obliged to attend so it tends to attract only those who enjoy breakfast and intend to make the most of it. Some sit quietly munching, others chatter about anything and nothing. An exchange of “Morning!”s erupts each time someone walks in the room. People tend to drift off once finished, leaving different combinations of seated eaters from the beginning of the breakfast session who then spark up new conversations. Sometimes someone is left stranded on a table by themselves when people leave, and then move to join a more convivial table.

Weeding, digging over and spreading muck on this heavy clay bed took over a fortnight's hard labour

All this is very different from my old way of doing breakfast when I had to commute to work five days a week. This was normally eaten either alone or with a flatmate. I wouldn’t gobble it down but the sense of being required to launch myself at a certain time into the fray of London’s transport system would definitely diminish the enjoyment. Only at weekends would breakfast become again what it should be - a savoured morning edible ritual, preferably conducted out on the balcony in the sunshine. Here’s to the Most Important Meal of the Day!