BREAKFAST

They say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. I agree; I can't do anything in the morning without a full tummy. Last Sunday I did 70kms of cycling, starting at 9.00am, after I had got up too late at 8.20am. That left far too little time to digest my breakfast properly, which meant that I was struggling from halfway up the first hill. Since I am going cycling again tomorrow morning, I will have to set the alarm for 7.00am.

When I lived in New York for a year as a 21-year old, I ate breakfast out every morning. A full cooked breakfast with unlimited coffee was ridiculously cheap if you ate it before 11.00am; under a dollar, if I remember correctly. American coffee shops being thin on the ground in rural Denmark, I have to make it myself. And over the past year or so, it has gelled into a fairly fixed ritual.

Breakfast nowadays consists of; either cereal with milk and no sugar or half a fresh grapefruit with sugar (it was grapefruit this morning), followed by two pieces of toast with butter and marmalade. This is washed down with a large cop of very strong coffee made in my new espresso coffee machine. That is generally enough to get me through until "elevenses", when I have a cup of coffee and a biscuit or two.

When I visit my mother's (as I will do in a couple of weeks), I get to smear the toast with Roses' lime marmalade, which is absolutely the best marmalade in the world. I must remember to bring back a jar, along with the Branston Pickle.

Walter Blotscher