An ode to breakfasts past

It’s cold here today. A freezing wind is whipping down from the snowcapped mountains of Lesotho. Not a day for flip-flops. Which is the first (of many) reasons to be grouchy. Its days like this I miss the bakery near my house the most. It had a dingy, dive bar feel to it… a hole-in-the-wall with the core-values of questionable hygiene and extra bacon, their menus slipped into plastic folders so greyed and bent they were difficult to decipher.

I grouse about it to my wife.

‘You’re never going to let this go are you?’

Me: ‘Never’.

They closed down in December for renovations and never reopened. They had the best coffee. And the most amazing breakfast in the history of the world. I feel about them the way Anthony Bourdain felt about Waffle House. I miss them sooo much.

‘It is indeed marvellous. An irony-free zone where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts, where everybody regardless of race, creed, color, or degree of inebriation, is welcomed. Its warm yellow glow, a beacon of hope and salvation inviting the hungry, the lost, the seriously hammered, all across the south, to come inside. A place of safety and nourishment. It never closes. It is always, always faithful, always there, for you‘

– Anthony Bourdain, narrating his Waffle House experience

I also miss Anthony Bourdain*. All the people I like are dead. Christopher Hitchens. Anthony Bourdain. Theodore Roosevelt. Admittedly the latter has been long dead. I hope to join them one day. In the feast halls of Valhalla.

*I reference him so much he should probably get his own category.

We end up ordering UberEats. Which gets delivered in a blue Uno Fiat held together with… well probably mould. And maybe duct tape in the areas of substantial structural regress.

The universe is trying to placate me. I smile… but it’s not the same.