"Breakfasting up is hard to do."
Breakfast, quoth the Wikipedians, "is the first meal of the day, preceding lunch or dinner, and is typically eaten in the morning." Such, meine Damen und Herren, are the great profundities of life, and we here at Lexicon Harlot Inc. are dedicated to plumbing their conceptual depths with all the scholarly rigour of the western world's finest conceptual depth plumbers. Why, f'rinstance, do we speak of today's breakfast preceding today's lunch or dinner, and not of today's breakfast as pursuing yesterday's lunch and dins, or, for that matter, of today's lunch and dinner as preceding tomorrow's breakfast? Does this rhetorical breakfast-centricity not reflect a certain temporal prejudice, a confusion of chronological relatives with chronological absolutes? What if I have no lunch or dinner, so that my breakfast does not precede 'em? Is it no longer a breakfast?
On another, but related, matter, this morning, faced with a superfluity of superannuated soy milk, I elected not to consume it in all its fermented glory on my muesli, but to disguise it in pancake batter - to which end, I battered me the best batter ever. Oh yes I did. I bet a better batter bar none never was.
And now, all you wanted to know but never dared ask! (Steady on, soldier.) Yes, without further ado, I present to you the ingredients: wholemeal self raising flour (rest of packet), No Egg (yes, yes, I know), soy-linseed-almond mix (left over from my sister's trip to the nut providore up the road last June), poppy seeds (coupla spoonfuls), tahini (a bold addition, but by Jove, a good 'un), dried barberries (not for them with child), and a goodly slosh of thoroughly alcoholic soy milk. Slop into sizzling frypan, cook, eat with your pancake condiments of preference. Lunch, a flash of sandwich in a crowded hour, didn't hold a candle to my pièce de crêpe (as opposed to my piece of crap, if you'll pardon my English).
Now seems as good a time as ever to spread glad tidings of great joy: yes, "ante-jentacular" is a word. Good mates with "post-prandial".
7 comments:
A mischevious wikipedian appears to have slipped a message into the opening lines of that article! Probably best to look at it now, ere the wikipedia editors take it out...
Important questions indeed: also, if one eats no meal but breakfast during the day, and then on the following day again eats nothing but breakfast, then in chronological terms, wouldn't that second breakfast exist in relation to the first breakfast as a conventional lunch does to a conventional breakfast? Could it not, in fact, be defined as lunch, instead of breakfast?
No, it would just be brunch, in the truest sense of the word. It would be the truest brunch that ever was consumed.
Darnit, Timnus, whatever it was going down at the Wikipedia Breakfast Page I missed, on account of my untimely departure from the 'puter to go see Lord of the Flies, Thespianised.
Don't suppose you could enlighten us?
These questions about the relativity of breakfast are all good ones, and I'm not entirely sure whether "brunch" satisfies 'em, Lizzie. Indeed, I have similar questions about brunch. Does it presuppose the onset of dinner, for instance? If one dies shortly after brunch, thus never eating dinner, does it cease to have been brunch? Eek.
Some trickster, for a lark, had typed in bold at the beginning of the 'Breakfast' entry:
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm I hate Lydia Maggs
In Hillaire Belloc's poem on matters dietary, 'Henry King', he sets out a difficult problem:
The chief defect of Henry King
Was chewing little bits of string.
And his moral is cried out by Henry, shortly afterwards, on his deathbed:
Oh children, all attend to me!
That Breakfast, Dinner, Lunch, and Tea
Are all the human frame requires!"
- With that the wretched child expires.
Gosh. Poor Lydia Maggs.
Captain Nemo, ante-jentacular
Avoided matters squid or tentacular;
But Captain Nemo, post-prandial
Felt more leader-ous, and command-ial.
Er, that's the best I can do this morning.
On a cold winter’s morning
we often like to down
our antejentacular coffees
(anabiotics of renown)
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