The older you get, the more unfashionable your past becomes. Now that I am in my mid-50s, my early memories of childhood breakfasts feel like something which should be viewed if not in black and white, then certainly in those overcooked candy tones that passed for early TV colour. This is because every one of those breakfasts, every day, was also cooked. I would dress, or in the earliest days, be dressed, to the smell of sizzling bacon and frying eggs. Both my parents worked full-time, so in my memory the heavy lifting was done by one of a succession of au pairs, a lovely young woman named Laura from Turin or Brigitte from Stockholm. God knows what they made of this peculiarly British ritual.
And it really was peculiar. My mother, Claire, had started her career as a nurse. By the time I was born she was already a freelance advice columnist. She had started building the library of academic work which would underpin her knowledge of physical and sexual health. And yet here she was, every damn morning, shovelling the saturated, crispy fats down us because in the early 1970s that was the only proper way to start the day. I loved those bacon and egg breakfasts.
They couldn’t last. One morning, when I was about six or seven, the gas was not lit. The frying pan stayed in the cupboard. Now it was toast and Marmite. And not the nice white toast. It was made from a brick of wholemeal bread, the colour of hessian, from which slices were sawn rather than cut. Something to do with fibre and the gut. Nor was it butter. Claire had read something somewhere about that. Now it had to be Flora. It was better for us, apparently. I don’t doubt it. It just wasn’t as nice. The curious thing is that very quickly we adapted to the new breakfast normal. Life moved on. The bacon and egg years were over. I mourn them still.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
