Our first morning in the diningroom we were offered a full English breakfast. I was already on high alert because I had seen a plate emerging with the rashers absolutely swimming in bean juice. I didn’t want the same fate to befall me, but I also didn’t want to have the alternative – cornflakes – because we had those at home and I was on my holidays.
I ordered the fry but was emphatic about my abhorrence of beans. My poor friend had to have the cornflakes because she was a vegetarian, it was the 1990s and Linda McCartney hadn’t made it to Torquay. When my plate came out it was bean free.
However, there was another evil entity abutting my sausages. It was a whole, scalped, cold, raw, tinned tomato, surrounded by a pool of its own watery juice. This monstrous red flesh ball looked like it had just been lifted out of a skull.
It was like no tomato I had ever seen before. I asked for the cornflakes and became a lifelong devotee to a dry fry. No beans, no tomatoes, nothing emitting moisture.
A runny yoke is permissible, but I alone will control where it goes. Fast forward a few decades and it’s early 2025. I’m about to embark on the dance of the hotel breakfast buffet in a charming four-star establishment in Co Kildare.
Is there anything more enchantingly predictable than the dance of the hotel breakfast buffet? First you must choose your time wisely. Come down too early and you forfeit time luxuriating in the hotel bed and watching Sky News because working out the c.
