Full-on

Yesterday evening, for some reason, I thought that a full-on breakfast would be the thing this morning. A thought that survived until the morning, and I did indeed have such a breakfast, with BH participating around the edges. I can't remember when I last did such a thing, outside of a hotel - although in hotels I usually go for sausage sandwiches these days, rather than for the whole thing.

So bacon, egg, tomatoes and a slice of DIY brown. No lard in the cupboard, so fried in oil, which means, inter alia, that the fried egg was not quite what it should be. Tomatoes cooked in their own pan. It all went down very well.

The snap above, turned up by Bing and lifted from reference 1, comes close, and appears to have been properly cooked, rather than the sort of thing you get in the breakfast buffet at, for example, Travelodge. But I would say that, for me, the snap involves too many different items, too many flavours. I also failed to work out what the items top left were, despite reading the recipe that came with it. Maybe a sausage, cut in half length-wise?

Maybe also a variant on the unconscious decision making mentioned at reference 2? With the variation being that I don't know why I wanted the breakfast - it seeming unlikely that it had anything much to do with hunger. Which reminds me that, for most of my time in the world of work, I hardly bothered with breakfast at all and did not take much lunch. Wouldn't do now, with regular feeding being the form, despite the lack of serious exercise.

I associate to the workmen's caffs of old, crowded at 08:00, smoke filled and staffed by ladies of middle years. There the form was to take breakfast with a slop of tinned tomatoes - which seemed to be popular - but I have never been very keen on them myself. Either as part of breakfast or as an ingredient in something else. Round tomatoes much better than tinned.

While these caffs, once an important part of the working day, have more or less vanished. As have proper kippers with bones and so forth - once available from British Rail and the better sort of hotel. Last taken in the Ardui Hotel up north, where, as I recall, one got two large kippers, grilled and rather salty. Which is what we did when I was a child, but now we go in for simmering in water - in our fine fish kettle from John Lewis. Kippers from Craster, via Epsom Waitrose.

Failed to find a breakfast at reference 3 this morning. Maybe kippers are off there too?

PS 1: we stayed in Craster once, more or less next to a smokery. I remember lots of black, tarry stuff oozing out of the ridge-top louvres.

PS 2: today's bacon came from Sainsbury's, and was said to involve both Demerara sugar and smoking over apple wood chips. Unusually for Sainsbury's, cut maybe an eighth of an inch thick. A lot of their meat, particularly their ham, is cut far too thin for flavour - assuming that there was any in the first place.

References

Reference 1: https://unpeeledjournal.com/traditional-full-english-breakfast/.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/09/trolleys-998-999-and-1000.html. PS 4.

Reference 3: https://ardlui.com/.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demerara_River. With the sugar being barged down the river in the olden days?