Now then, breakfast. Not my favourite meal of the day, in fact, I often rather naughtily forget about it. However, when you’re up at 04.30 ready to attack the day with gusto (and other cleaning products), you might start to feel peckish around nine in the morning, kind of lunchtime on the shifted body clock. This was the case with me last Friday, and I downed fingers to go in search of something to eat. Had I been writing by hand, panel beating a car, or extracting someone’s tooth, I would have downed tools, but my tools are my imagination and typing digits, so there we are. Off to the kitchen for a snout around the fridge to find nothing of interest, to the cupboard to discover I’d finished the emergency cornflakes the day before, and as a last resort, the fruit bowl. Such choice! No insta-satisfaction including sugar from Mr Kellog, the pears were still hard, and I couldn’t be bothered with the toaster, but there was some natural yoghurt not yet turning blue in the fridge, so I opted for that.
Greek yoghurt (GY) is a thing in its own class of foodstuffs. You can mix it with garlic and cucumber to make tzatziki, add fruit and healthy bits with honey for a classic Greek holiday brochure breakfast, or you can use it to ward off yeast infections – so I heard in a queue one day in the pharmacy. (Do you smear or dip? I still don’t know.) I opted for a bowl of yoghurt with honey because we keep a jar in the cupboard somewhere, and I know it’s there… Ah, right at the back, where it has lain undisturbed for some time. Sadly, it resembled one of those souvenirs from a seaside resort where you buy an old jar filled with layers of varying coloured sand. Silty at the bottom, then a layer of nearly clear, then a layer of crystals and none of them an inviting colour, so that went to the bin. Ah ha! I thought, maybe some jam. I do like something sweet to go with the tart taste of GY, and a teaspoon of jam mixed in turns it from a health-farm breakfast into a Ski yoghurt of my youth. What did I have available in the treasure trove which is the fridge? Orange marmalade. Hm. Pickled chilis? Maybe not. Then, there was some mandarin jam bought for some inexplicable reason by persons unknown, and it had one experimental spoonful missing; a clue which told me I’d tried this before and not liked it, so that, too, was off the menu. And then, I noticed the word ‘Honey’ on a plastic bottle.
I am slightly averse to eating things from plastic squeezy bottles, and the aversion runs to spray cans, too. I mean, who sits there with their favourite dessert and applies highly pressurised, chemically enhanced chemicals from a can of compressed air with the sound of a medically worrying fart? The best use for such an abomination is the pre-lent carnival, where the little whatnots in the square use it to attack each other when the silly string runs out. Similarly, who wants to apply anything to a plate that comes from a gaudy yellow plastic bottle with a list of added ingredients longer than your shopping bill? I mean, honey is honey. It’s natural, so leave it as natural.
Honey has once been pollen. It gets shoved into the insect equivalent of saddlebags, transported back to the hive where the bees reduce the water content from 80% down to 18%, and break down the complex sugars with enzymes (while listing their equipment in their best books), and share the regurgitated nectar between themselves before storing it, fanning it to thicken it, and then covering it. This covering is created by young female bees (aged 12 to 18 days old, I am told), who convert the twice-vomited honey into waxy scales which they then secrete through their abdominal glands, chew with saliva, and then spit out the resulting beeswax over the storage units, or use it to polish their antique furniture. I mean, how more natural can you get?
However, with no other option, I take the squeezy yellow bottle of honey from the fridge, knowing that, as it’s comes in plastic and has had the life e-numbered out of it, so it will never go off, and I take it to the counter where I squeeze it over my bowl of yoghurt. There follows a little bottle flatulence and then that rather worrying and unidentifiable dribble of clear liquid that comes from things unshaken, un-lanced or undead. Finally, an ooze of dark yellow substance emerges, and it looks like gone-off honey. ‘Oh dear,’ I think. ‘But maybe it still tastes alright.’ So, I try half a teaspoon of yoghurt with this stuff mixed in, only to discover it is in fact honey mustard. ‘Oh.’ Plain yoghurt and rolled oats it is then. Ah well.
That was not my only highlight of the weekend, at least, I hope it isn’t, because I am writing this on Saturday morning, during that silent time between the bier parades of Good Friday night and the accompanying bangers thrown into the alley beneath the bedroom window, and the mayhem of Saturday midnight, when everything blows up. I’ll fill you in on any more details if they come in over the weekend.
