Opinion

Starting every holiday day with a heart-attack on a plate

Breakfasts are itemised with geographical exactitude, though constituents are identical
Breakfasts are itemised with geographical exactitude, though constituents are identical Breakfasts are itemised with geographical exactitude, though constituents are identical

FLICKERING through holiday accommodation brochures I see that the two chief selling-points for any hotel or B an B are the en suite bathroom and the full cooked breakfast.

"Full English/Scottish/Welsh/Irish or Ulster Breakfast." It is itemised with geographical exactitude, though its constituents are identical.

It's far from reassuring to realise that the whole of the tourist industry throughout the British Isles starts the day with a heart-attack on a plate.

Isn't it strange that most people go out to do a day's work on half a cup of tea and half a slice of toast, but a morning's sightseeing in a strange city decrees taking aboard enough ballast for a full day's voyage.

Were the average wife to serve up to the average husband on a daily basis nowadays the cholesterol time-bomb that is an Ulster Fry, she'd be had up for attempted manslaughter - but the catering trade seems licensed to kill.

An allied oddity is the growing number of cafés, fast-food outlets and restaurants who proudly proclaim in curly letters on a blackboard `ALL DAY BREAKFAST – SERVED ALL DAY'.

A truly moveable feast. Some establishments go so far as to itemise in coloured chalk the constituents of their all-day breakfast and it's sad to see the ethnic purity of the Ulster Fry corrupted with the substitution of such alien imports as baked beans, potato waffles and hash browns in place of traditional soda farls and potato bread. Shame on them. But there you are.

They wouldn't supply it if there was no call for it and the steady stream of starving students, famished back-packers and long-distance lorry drivers justifies the day-long sizzle of the spitting pan, the blue smoke wreathing upwards obscuring the Healthy Eating Certificate, while passers-by, noses twitching like Bisto kids, inhale the siren smell of hot fat.

Be honest. We're only partial converts to healthy eating and backslide with great glee every opportunity we get.

That's why whole families who wouldn't eat three Weetabix between them at home, sit in shorts and T-shirts at eight in the morning in hotel dining-rooms working their way stolidly through fruit juice, cereal, a full-size fry-up, tea, toast and marmalade on the principle "if you’ve paid for it, you might as well eat it". Besides which, you'll be peckish by 11.

Let us look closely at what they're consuming. The catering sausage is a peculiar animal, only distantly related to the one which might grace your place at home.

The catering sausage is a sleek beast, plump and varnished. Despite its attractive appearance, it is of uncertain pedigree, tasting of neither pork nor beef, but spicy pink flannel.

Its companion, the rubber rasher is rindless and fat-free, thus ensuring it to be flavour-free as well. The fried egg looks up at you with a single jaundiced eye and the squishy, reddish, glistening thing that implodes in your mouth like a water-bomb is a tinned tomato.

Such is usually the sad reality. As the philosopher said, "the wonderful things are never as wonderful as you hope they'll be. The sea is less warm, the joke less funny, the taste is never as good as the smell."

But occasionally, the sublime fry-up lingers in the memory and we pursue its chimaera as King Arthur's knights did the Holy Grail.

Savoury and tasty it may be, but it leaves you with a thirst like a drunkard, a decidedly heavy feeling around the duodenum and a major processing job for the gastric juices.

"Never again," we vow, white-lipped with indigestion tablets. But like the habitual sinner, we're drawn inexorably back to the kind of establishment where your arteries fur up just reading the menu.

Shall it be a `mini trucker' with just one each of sausage, bacon, egg, tomato, black pudding, white pudding, soda farl and potato bread? Or the mortal sin of the `Full Monty' on a plate the size of a wagon wheel?

The smiling waitress is intent on killing you with kindness. "D'ye want chips with yer breakfast?" she asks.