With a cooked breakfast, there is no real ‘headline event’; much like a Sunday roast the end goal here is a forkful with a piece of everything, and a scrap of toast/ Yorkshire pudding to run around the plate soaking up the overspill. We can consider the best elements to be:
The fat juicy middle of the sausage, the meaty end of the rasher of bacon, the yolk of the egg, the central part of the tomato (away from the stalk), the crispier end of the hash brown (occurring at the end containing the smaller of the two acute angles where, for the sake of argument, we consider the hash brown to be a right-angled triangle). This is all allowing for variations according to personal preference and constituent elements, obviously.
As such, the first task after placement of the breakfast and following the planning phase is to eliminate the weaker elements, the egg white, the sausage ends, the fatty part of the bacon, excess bean and tomato. This can be done in almost any order, though I advise the pairing of bacon and tomato takes preference, with sausage and egg also working well. When this is done, I often find it is time for a break. Time to lean back and do a bit of further admin before moving on to the climactic finale!
Questions to ask here include:
* Am I sure that I have left only the best parts of the breakfast?
* Am I likely to run out of anything or will there be a surplus? This needs to be dealt with immediately.
* How many mouthfuls am I likely to get out of what remains?
This last question should be what guides you from here to completion. Obviously, an egg yolk can be split into no more than four quarters to be a worthy constituent of a mouthful, so we are looking at four final forkfuls. After cutting up four good pieces of bacon, sausage, hash brown and, should it be present, black pudding (how much of each is down to your personal taste), and allowing at least three beans per section, it is once again time to eliminate the remainder.
The next is my favourite part of the breakfast. Provided your technique has been efficient and the plate and its components are still warm, what you have now is four perfect piles of squishy goodness. As soon as you make your first incision into the yolk, it’s a race against time to make sure it doesn’t go cold or dribble out of its casing completely. As discussed, the expert will leave a corner of well-buttered toast to quickly mop up any liquids left on the plate, but this must be done quickly to become a constituent part of the final mouthful rather than a disappointing addendum.
Ending a meal on a bad mouthful will sully the memory of it entirely. No dinner can cope with its denouement involving the spitting of a mouthful of steak gristle into a napkin, a spoonful of curry with no meat but only rice and sauce, the few peas and carrots at the end of a roast dinner. I find a depressing comparison here to be drawn between dinners and relationships. Perhaps my ability to draw comparisons between women I have loved and cooked breakfasts is why I find myself single, but where the links exist I feel I should point them out.
At the beginning of a relationship there seems to be so much promise and excitement as each new discovery forms a stronger bond and all points to a perfect future together. There is a part of me that thinks this the perfect time to break up and go your separate ways. Like a football manager who has taken a side from the bottom of the Conference to the Premier League, step away while you can still be idolised rather than staying until the bitter end, because bitter is all it will be in my humble experience.
That it should be newsworthy when an elderly couple celebrates a long wedding anniversary is evidence enough of how rare such an occurrence is, and we should not be fooled into thinking either that simply because they have stayed together for sixty years that they are happier than they would be if on their own.
Nobody likes change. Staying in a relationship beyond the honeymoon period, be it a literal honeymoon or not, is simply a trade-off. You are trading the irrational fear of dying alone for the constant ebb and flow of a life lived in compromise and without personal space. I am quite sure there will be those reading this who consider themselves to be in a relationship which allows them to express themselves fully, spend time on their own and also commit to another person’s happiness.
Bully for you – feel free to write to me and I might change my mind – but I suspect that there are far more who are still looking for the right person. I suspect there are far more people who thought they had found the right person but discovered only that they were to feel the pain all the more acutely when something went wrong, or they were taken away from them. The pain caused by these latter events is crippling. Anyone who tells you that it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all has never done both.
Don’t wait for the gristly end – measure your mouthfuls carefully.
I finish my breakfast, fold my napkin and place the knife and fork neatly together on top, but when I look over at the other side of the table, there is nobody there to smile back or applaud my completion. It’s just me, feeling fat. No Spanish Rita, not even an equally hungover friend. The more elaborate the meal and the more perfect my execution, the greater my sense of shame at having eating it alone. This is worsened by the fact that I also inevitably seem to eat too much. I have once again reached a point where all I can do is make noise, in the hope that releasing sound will make space where currently there is none.
Bbbbuuuuueeeerrrrggggghhhh!
It doesn’t work, and the fact that when I attempt to sit forward my distended belly pushes me back and holds me captive on my chair like a greedy turtle on its back makes me hate myself even more.
You big, fat, greedy, little wanker! You could have eaten half of that, and given the other half to someone who might have enjoyed it just as much as you, and might love you for having made it for them.
That is true enough. Sat high up in the Dales I once drank wine, grilled meat and ate fresh, vibrant salad looking across a beautiful sunset after a day spent at a place I hold very dear in my heart, after a particularly tranquil afternoon when everything seemed like it would be OK. It hurt me to think that no one would ever know the perfection of that moment but me, and I would never be able to describe it to them as I have been unable to express the beauty of that spot here in words.
Somehow, happiness is not diminished by being shared out with other people. It thrives like bacteria, duplicating itself for as many people as want to be infected by it. The happier you manage to make yourself on your own, the more acutely aware you become of the futility of it.
As miserable as the end of a relationship can be, it is the absence of a deeper happiness when alone that overrides most of what I have just written. Looking over the table and not seeing a smiling face, having no one to plan things for or buy gifts for commits me to a half life. It is my desire to share perfection, not half my miseries that makes me text Gemma. Reaching for my phone I begin to compose a message:
Hi Gemma. Sorry it has taken me so long to reply, I’m simply a moron. It would be great to see you some time, let me know when is good for you. Jon
And before I can think twice about it, I press send.
Now you’ve gone and done it.
09.36
FIFTY THOUSAND … AND FOUR
I came up from breakfast, scribbled a few notes down on a scrap of paper, showered and packed my things and paid the lady (who I noticed went straight upstairs afterwards to check what state I’d left her room in; she would have been almost disappointed to find I had made the bed and folded my used towels neatly on the bathroom floor). I loaded my car and filled up with petrol at the petrol station down the road from the guest house before heading out of town and on to the motorway.
I did all this and Gemma still hadn’t fucking replied to my message.
It’s a Sunday morning so chances are she is still asleep. Whether or not she is alone in her bed is a matter for my overactive and uniquely negative imagination. She isn’t alone in what I’m imagining, and she isn’t asleep either. Driving should clear my head – it did the trick with whatever was bothe
ring me when I set off.
If she still hasn’t replied by the time I get home then what will I do? I could call in at her work to see what she is doing; perhaps I will see her in the arms of another man and I can stop thinking that there might be any hope of a happy ending for us. Oddly, I think I almost want this to happen, as if seeing that would take the matter out of my hands. No pressure to be the right man for her any more, as she has chosen someone else. As any football fan will tell you, it’s the hope that eventually kills you.
Despite all my best efforts to think about other things I cannot stop waiting for the message to beep into my life, which it stubbornly refuses to do. I glance down to check the time in the hope that I will discover that somehow I have entered a kind of black hole and that only three minutes have passed since I sent the initial text. Admittedly checking the clock in my car won’t necessarily give me a fully accurate impression of the time, nor would checking my watch, nor indeed checking both. I keep my watch fast so I’m not late for pressing engagements (the logic being that if I think it’s later than it actually is, I’ll set off sooner than actually necessary).
This being such a fiendishly intelligent plan, I decided to keep all my clocks fast to stop me checking one clock against another, but set them all forward by differing amounts, so as not to grow complacent. If my watch is four minutes fast, but my hallway clock is two minutes fast, my microwave clock seven minutes fast and my car display ten whole minutes fast, I will never truly know what the time is, only that by leaving when the clock in front of me tells me to leave, I am ahead of it. A selfless gesture on my part which ensures I am never late, but really only means that I spend time waiting not only for people who are late but also for people who are on time.
Obviously, if I kept all my clocks fast by exactly four minutes I would eventually grow so used to arriving four minutes early that I might be tempted to leave my house four minutes late, and then what? From there I would slide down the slippery slope descending through ‘assuming the person I am meeting will be late’, then down into ‘setting off late deliberately to see if I can shave time off my Personal Best journey time’ and eventually becoming the kind of person everybody assumes will be late. How these people are allowed to exist is beyond me; being late is always a status play. People who arrive late do so precisely because they know they will be waited for. Until we all make a decision to leave behind those who do not respect schedules, they will never learn. If this means leaving your twelve-year-old son in a service station on the M1 then so be it. He has to learn.
Glancing down to the clock on the dashboard, before I see the time my eyes are drawn to the milometer. It reads: 50 004 miles.
This is not good! While I had been thinking about Gemma and wondering why she hadn’t texted me back, I had completely forgotten that I was nearing my next ten-thousand-milestone. There are two types of people in this world: people who take an inordinate amount of pleasure from seeing the exact moment that their car’s mileage ticks over from a filthy mess of nines to any multiple of ten thousand miles, and people who are dead inside.
I remember having looked down when I arrived back after the gig yesterday and noticing that I had done 49 992 miles, making a mental note to keep an eye on it. Now that moment has passed me by, never to return. This is exactly the sort of careless mistake I pride myself on, nay I define myself, by not making.
Fucking fuck! I can feel my legs starting to tingle with frustration, I yearn to run or to lash out against something to make it feel like what just happened wasn’t my own stupid fault. I know that this is not something that should affect me as badly as it seems to, but knowing that only makes it worse.
When, in the past, I have been down about my life for no justifiable reason, friends have thought it helpful to point out all the things that make me fortunate in an attempt to pacify my mood. In truth, this only ever makes it worse. I know very well that I have no reason to feel aggrieved – I am fully aware of how lucky I am, but knowing it and still being down makes me hate myself all the more. Similarly here, the knowledge that the majority of people, even if they were frustrated by having missed the milestone, would simply tut or sigh and then move on makes me all the more irritated by the side of my personality which continues to pick away at myself.
50 004. Urgh. 4. 4. 4.
I pull off the motorway at the next service station, some three miles down the carriageway, to get my head together as I can feel the overwhelming urge to floor the accelerator and stop only when stopped by something bigger and heavier than me. Slowing to ten miles per hour and turning into a parking space (I am too angry to even think about reverse parking), in my desperation I begin to wonder if I reversed for seven miles whether the mileage would move backwards to exactly 50,000. I know deep down that this is unlikely but I am still too upset to let this one go. I have been looking forward to that figure since I witnessed the turn to 40,000 while driving a friend to a gig in the Midlands last Christmas. I remember telling him to lean over and watch but he wasn’t bothered – he just carried on staring out of the window. People are seldom interested in the things I am. Fifty thousand is the second biggest milestone too, behind the big ton of course. Now there is nothing to look forward to.
It’s not that these are life-alteringly significant moments – I’m not stupid enough to believe that – but I see them as little bonuses, the likes of which crop up every now and again in life to reward you for paying attention. The neatness of the number and the line of fat, little ‘0’s is a pat on the back for all those people who understand that, as regularly as the hands of fate tear and scratch at your plans, they can reward you too. If I didn’t take pleasure in the neatness and order that can shine through in the universe then I could never cope with the death and destruction it wreaks in equal measure.
The fact remains that if I had not been thinking of her, I would have seen the 50k. She is clouding my judgement. I wind down the windows of my car to feel the breeze against my face, close my eyes and start to take deep breaths, strangling the steering wheel with my clenched fists. Some quiet meditation and then a coffee is in order.
10.38
COFFEE BREAK(DOWN)
There is a place I like to go which makes the things I worry about seem insignificant. I would even go as far as to say that of all the places in which you could find me happiest (though I must point out that by finding me you have more than likely inflicted upon that happiness a fatal wound), an autumnal afternoon, sat quietly on a rock at the water’s edge some half a mile upstream of a certain waterfall is hard to beat. Quite a specific place to suggest, I’ll admit, though in truth it doesn’t have to be any waterfall in particular; to me they all share the same energy and characteristics. I close my eyes and transport myself to the last time I was there in the hope that some of the tension I feel will disappear.
A perfect afternoon involves me arriving first at the body of the falls and staring for a long while into the white water as it crashes downwards, pounding the rocks below, before climbing up its side and walking away until all the drama and the deep noise from earlier begin to fade. I walk until all that remains as a clue to what lies ahead is a gentle murmuring; a kind of radio static which, rather than irritate, serves to emphasise the feeling of brief purgatory from something more sinister.
What excites me first and foremost about this spot is that were you to have approached from further upstream, as the water itself has done, now slipping by me in blissful ignorance, there is no way that you could predict what lies ahead. Knowing something that nothing around me knows gives me an undignified but nevertheless inherently human sense of superiority.
Although picturesque and quaint enough in summer, and far more popular with daytrippers, I prefer to visit in autumn when the grey skies above lend the water a darker and more ominous power and make its depth more difficult to decipher. Huge, jutting rocks break through at irregular intervals along its width, breaking up its otherwise regular flow and dominating the trickling
waters.
At that moment, those rocks seem impenetrably strong, as though the water has no option but to yield to their weight and simply skirt around them, but over time they will be relentlessly eroded into submission. This slow and steady approach to achieving its goals is the first attribute that I find fascinating about flowing water. Such great things will be achieved and yet no single step will be visible to the naked eye. It is not just the rocks that will disappear – the fall itself is working its way slowly backwards, eating up the scenery.
Eventually entire landscapes will be formed and re-formed by the relentless waters. In centuries to come, the spot on which I am sitting won’t even exist, never mind the problems which occupy my mind as I sit here. I laugh to think that, if such things exist (and I doubt very much that they do), my ghost will appear to the onlookers of the future to be hovering in mid-air, looking out over seemingly nothing at all.
So many silent power struggles are going on here, and so much more lies ahead, but sitting on my rock, eating my lunch, it seems a scene of such calm tranquillity. Leaves and insects float gently across the still surface of the slower moving waters by my side. The sound the water makes as it trickles over the pebbles that have themselves been smoothed and perfected over time is a gentle sound – it licks at my eardrums. It isn’t necessary to be immersed in water to feel cleansed by it.
In my mind, more inspiring still is the enthusiasm with which the water continues to surge forward, despite the futility of its cyclical journey. There will be no finish line for these tiny particles; there will be no winner. If they survive the drop that lies ahead and make it as far as the ocean, they will more than likely simply be picked up and dropped back on higher ground to start their journey all over again, with miles and miles of new course to navigate and new obstacles to overcome. It cannot ever stop.
It's Not Me, It's You Page 10