Joanne McNeill: Breakfast fraught with choices

Joanne McNeill.

"Hope is a good breakfast but it is a bad supper," Francis Bacon 1561-1626.

Among the manifold advice on health and nutrition with which we are bombarded daily by a media ever ready to scare us to death with the wickedness of our ways is the old adage - breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

The biggest problem is what to have.

Although undoubtedly not recommended by nutritionists, stiff black coffee and cigarettes are non-negotiable prerequisites for refocusing eyes, which somehow in insubstantial sleep develop the ability to see through things.

After that, the best breakfast is porridge. Oatmeal is cheaper than chips and is the magic substance which makes Scots so clever they invented almost everything. Unfortunately though, three forms of white death - sugar, salt and cream - are necessary to make the grey glug palatable. While sugar and cream are still off the approved list, happily the reputation of salt has been rehabilitated recently by studies showing links between its consumption, high blood pressure and heart disease were based on shonky science.

Soft boiled eggs with toast soldiers are excellent protein-packed, nostalgic breakfasts but fraught, like everything today, with financial, ethical and practical issues - battery layers versus affordable eggs, egg cup scarcity, and crucial timing difficulties to avoid indigestible hard boiling, for which old fashioned, sand-filled egg-timers are more reliable than clock watching, but these too are like hens' teeth.

Scrambled eggs fail the queasiness test. They look too much like fresh vomit to countenance first thing; but poached eggs and stewed tomatoes on toast with a sprinkling of fresh parsley is a princely treat, if a little extravagant for everyday consumption.

The best breakfast of all time was at the crack of a New Year's dawn. Having awoken on a boat, I dived overboard and swam to shore through a cool silver sea before, with a companion who rowed in with the requisites, we made a fire on the stony beach with driftwood, brewed the best smoky billy coffee I have ever tasted in my life, then feasted on ripe mulberries from a coastal tree which somehow the local birds had neglected to strip, while a passing stranger entertained us with an unlikely story about the King of Tonga.

At another extreme, someone I knew survived three years working in the tourist industry in the fleshpots of the south around Queenstown on a daily breakfast of brandy and chocolate fish, and seemed little the worse for wear.

The current favourite morning option - local windfall avocado on toast with a squeeze of lime juice and cracked black pepper over the to-do list - reminded me wistfully of my last breakfast in bed.

It was a decade ago - avocado and tomato on bread baked in a camp oven on an open fire, all the sweeter for the reminder of blithe youth even longer past when - seemingly without creaking bones, urgent obligations to rush to fulfil in the new normal, or important nutritional decisions to make - frequent cosy breakfasts in bed were commonplace, taken for granted.

Where did those carefree days go?

Maybe I'll try one tomorrow, on a tray, for old time's sake.