I think the rot set in with food fads. How far back do they go? I have no idea, but it seems like centuries now. Have you ever noticed how common it is for those soulless eco warriors or proponents of any other cause that involves having more miserable self-flagellating lives, and all enforced with a remorseless addiction to legislation and compulsion, are associated with some sort of ostentatious self-flagellating diet regime and boring food?
It’s over 30 years since I set out on a motorcycle tour of England to take photographs for one of my first Roman history and archaeology books. One day en route I was cold, tired, and hungry. I stopped at a transport café somewhere in the West Midlands. I ordered the full works: eggs, bacon, sausage, fried mashed potato, tomatoes, baked beans, and ketchup.
The food exploded inside me like a nuclear tornado. I felt invigorated, alive, overwhelmed with a glow of optimism and the sense that the day was mine. Washed down by mugs of tea, the breakfast had transported me to paradise. I felt like an Olympian. Indeed, for a few hours, I was. It reminded me of a week on RAF camp as a cadet in 1973.
What’s more, it’s a utopia you can recreate any day of the week.
Who are these absurd celebrity restaurateurs with their ridiculous micro meals no bigger than a stock cube inserted into the middle of plates the size of truck wheels and prices to match? Have they or their patrons ever experienced fried mashed potato saturated with thick yellow egg yolk? I’ll bet they haven’t because if they had they’d have abandoned their holy cause on the spot.
For my money, such a full English breakfast feast can only be matched by sausages with cauliflower cheese, a couple of jacket potatoes and more beans, topped off by mustard.
With their own morale sapped by the food they eat, it’s no wonder that activists of our time have become enveloped in a cloud of millenarian despair and desperate to force everyone else to share in their self-denial.
So, this Xmas in the pit of Labour’s self-inflicted doom and hair-shirt vision of the future, with the shadow of JSO and its cohorts of miserable eco legionaries bent on turning us back to the Middle Ages before the world ends, and the proscriptive rules on car and boiler sales looming, sit down and have a monster breakfast fry-up.
And while you’re at it, watch the newly-colourized version of Sink The Bismarck on Youtube: a proper film with proper actors, a proper story, and a proper script – and, apart from the Kenneth More character, essentially a true one. When the battle’s over, he and his female assistant set out of course across Trafalgar Square for a monster breakfast.
You’ll feel overjoyed and buoyed up. The future will look rosy, and everything will seem possible. Indeed, it probably is.
So, pass the ketchup and Merry Xmas one and all.
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Forget the tea. A couple of pints of Guinness is the ideal accompaniment to a full English. Not recommended if you are riding a motorcycle though, or operating any machinery for that matter.
Guinness is not the ideal accompaniment for anything. Makes a good shampoo though.
Proper Guinness (NOT CHILLED) is glorious. And with a Full English to sort out a hangover, superb. Given all pubs now chill Guinness, if you can find Export Guinness anywhere, buy every bottle.
Buy LONDON PORTER instead, because that’s what Guinness is.
Invented in ENGLAND.
Yes, but please call those English Pints by their real name:
“LONDON PORTER”.
INVENTED IN ENGLAND to give strength to hardworking London porters.
RECIPE STOLEN and taken to Neutral Southern Ireland after the UK government banned its production during WWII fuel rationing, because dark beers require much more fuel for the longer malt roasting time, so only lagers and light-coloured ales were allowed during rationing.
Renamed “Guinness”, and sold to Nazi Submarine Crews welcomed into the harbours of Neutral Southern Ireland, a convenient base from which to attack the AMERICAN FOOD CONVOYS.
Hear, hear. And we had an empire and some of the finest technology in the world, when we went to the pub at lunchtime.
A manufacturing industry fuelled by pints of dark mild.
I like a full English breakfast but I must admit that afterwards I feel incapable of any physical or intellectual activity for about an hour. All the energy my body has is diverted to my digestive system.
See my comment above. You probably need to work up an appetite, ditch the carbs and maybe take a short nap – or maybe some NSDR (non-sleep deep rest) afterwards.
Thanks for the advice and I appreciate you are trying to be helpful but, in all honesty, my body doesn’t work like that. Just like some people can run a marathon or sing an opera.
Yes. We’re all different, depending on our up-bringing and stage in life, but I do think most of us can make changes to our lifestyles. I’m now 70 and for most of my life believed I couldn’t function without eating something before going to work. Now I’m retired I’ve more time to experiment and find I function better by eating breakfast late in the morning after activity, whether it be gardening, walking, shopping, whatever.
Milk 250 dairy cows from 4.30am and you will then know what a good breakfast tastes like. However, for 25 years, I ate 12 Weetabix every breakfast. On one occasion ate 17 of them as I was a bit peckish!!
Thanks for the reminder. I’d forgotten that where I had the full English on Sunday said they were opening on Boxing Day early to do breakfast.
With all the woke archaeology online and tv, you’re noticeably absent Guy.
I appreciated the way you rustled feathers on Time Team, which must have been a hotbed of leftists (although I’ve watched all the old episodes at least 20 times).
Let’s hear more ww2 and Roman thoughts from you in ’25.
Kedgeree, devilled kidneys, fried bread, freshly made English mustard, fresh Brazilian coffee and a couple of glasses of Nyetimber…
Had to look up Nyetimber. All the above with strong sweet tea and no alcohol.
That’s a decent looking spread. Bon appetit everyone!
Whatever it is that you like to eat, enjoy it to the full. Especially for the older readers, make sure you are getting plenty of protein and do load bearing exercises. We need to be strong and vigorous if we’re going to outlast the shower of wasters who are running things right now.
Guy, your my new bezzie mate!
Long live the lovely fry up
Never got beans or sausage for breakfast myself.Or fried bread.
Bacon, tomato, poached or scrambled, toast. Perhaps really good black pudding. Tabasco.
“Perhaps really good black pudding”
https://www.kimbersfarmshop.co.uk/sausages/black-pudding/
Made with fresh blood, and exquisite. Two a day for this feller
Nice. I live in the other end of Somerset and have access to good produce here also. Long may it last.
Whenever a pig was slaughtered in our Pennine village grandmother always got a pint of blood to make black pudding. She used onion, suet, breadcrumbs, dried herbs and salt/pepper to make this occasional delight.
. I can still a freshly baked huge white porcelain bowl of black pudding placed at lunchtime in the centre of the table and a dish of fresh made English mustard to accompany.
It was delicious served with some homemade crusty bread and butter.
For connoisseurs… Made in Stornoway but available at butchers on the mainland, avoid the delivery charges. The white pudding is also delicious
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https://www.charlesmacleod.co.uk/products/black-pudding
How deliciously tempting!
The best cup of tea you will EVER have, is the one which you have with bacon. They are a match made in Heaven.
I know some people say coffee instead, but they usually have stitches around their heads also.
“but they usually have stitches around their heads also.”
Or as Louis Theroux asked of an Arsenal supporter who had suffered brain damage…
“So, did you support Arsenal BEFORE the brain damage…”
My wife and I are carnivores, four years now.
My breakfast
Starts with home made Kefir, made when possible with raw milk, else super creamy local organic Jersey milk
2 x Black Pudding (Farm shop, made with fresh blood, so moist and gorgeous. With big chunks of pig fat. Fried in vast amounts of butter
Smoked streaky fried in lard (kept, and sometimes I make my own)
4 egg scrambled cooked in a lot of butter
Couple of our butcher’s sausages. Lard.
Butter from Black Pud poured onto the scrambled. + more butter
My wife and I eat a pack of butter between us every day
Bloody gorgeous.
Sounds great, though I would have the kefir at night to bolster my microbiome when my digestive system is less challenged.
I’d swap the lard for beef dripping.
Apart from the joy of a simple meal, well cooked. I believe there is real substance to the observations. Breakfast is the foundation of the day, and a flapjack bar isn’t going to do. You arrive at work all ready to go, a feeling that lasts through lunch and beyond. Eating a snack breakfast very quickly leaves you hungry and thinking of food, something we now sate with more snack food and biscuits, pastries and the like (Its continental you know…). They just don’t do the job right. You spend the whole day filling up on carbs and fatty snacks. Your productivity drops and your concentration wanders. This is ‘snack grazing’, a far poorer way of eating than three meals a day.
I feel so sorry for kids who get no breakfast beyond a ‘slice of toast’, and then a chicken mayo wrap for lunch, (Thanks to government nutrition targets). No wonder they are desperate for a big bag of Monster Munch on the way home. Incidentally, I cant help but notice that when the EU and our government got involved in telling people what and how much they should eat was the real start of the obesity epidemic. Who would have thought.? Mark it down as yet another ‘kind idea’, which delivered exactly the opposite result. Get out of our lives, for Gods sake.
This message is brought to you by a whacking bacon, mushroom, brown sauce sandwich and two mugs of tea..
Everyone is different. I couldn’t function after ‘a good full English breakfast’, but if you can, good luck and enjoy.
Best taken after working up an appetite and avoid the carbs. Have a 10 minute nap afterwards if necessary.
Agree the English breakfast is both uplifting and satisfying, especially if you are someone who breaks your fast late in the morning. Few decent transport cafes remain and should be treasured as havens of British traditions: down-to-earth, hearty grub and convivial atmosphere. I avoid carbs so skip the toast and especially the beans and hash browns. Eggs and fatty bacon fried in lard, grilled sausages (with coarse ground meat, not the slimy variety), plus mushrooms and tomato (if in season, otherwise they should be banned). A cuppa Yorkshire T is the best accompaniment. A Spoons “freedom breakfast” is acceptable, by substituting a 3rd egg and sausage for the beans and HBs – though the tomatoes are usually horrible.
A wonderful invention…..Long may it reign.
Thanks to Guy de la Bedoyere and the Daily Sceptic for this wonderfully cheerful article.
At home I like to cook enough for several English Breakfasts, and freeze all the items separately. Scrambled eggs work best for freezing, and cherry tomatoes as well, as long as you shake them up to keep them from freezing together.
The rot set in with the demonisation of animal fats and eggs based on flawed so-called scientific research – sound familiar? – and thus “fatty” bacon, sausages and eggs were off the menu.
Also a great deal of advertising for teeth-rotting breakfast cereals as being “healthy” alternative.
But baked beans as part of a full English breakfast are a relatively new addition in my experience – last 20 odd years – and have replaced grilled (sometimes tinned) tomatos.
Oh dear. Now I’m hungry.
I usually walk a 200 mile or so hike in the summer through various parts of our beautiful nation, despite the insidious plague of wind turbines and solar cells. I always start the day with a full English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish breakfast, call it what you will, it’s a signature of these islands.
We knew a lady well into her 80s who eat a full cooked breakfast every day. She was on no medication and was very sprightly, active and not obese.
Yes, sadly the issue in all of these things is that the eco warriors can’t just live their sad lives they insist on everyone else joining them. After all if you’re saving the planet then the end justifies the means.
Wonderful. Apart from Black Pudding. Not for me.
will go after the name in case the word English upsets anyone. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
This far left dictatorship is hitting everything that the indigenous population enjoys. They will go after the Full English Breakfast in their insane headlong rush to Nut Zero. Also these W
One thing I would add to the authors list regarding the film, ‘Sink the Bismark’, is Dana Wynter. Would I like to have a Full English Breakfast with her, obviously as she looked in 1960).
A fitting tribute to a venerable past that has been proscribed by the woke brigade. Enjoyment must be at the cost to someone else, so the SirKuS has banned it for everyone apart from those it describes as workers. A despotic tyranny is trying to subdue us all, but with a hearty brunch, we may yet prevail! Happy New Year! (If that hasn’t yet been cancelled)
I have got my Seafaring head on today. Handy really as I live by the sea. Decisions, decisions. What film shall I watch today, Sink the Bismark or The Battle of the River Plate?
I’m sure, in fact I know from personal experience, that the Full English is an ideal breakfast for somebody who is setting out on a motorcycle journey on a cold day. It’s also perfect for anybody engaged in hard pyhysical labour, construction, farming, fishing and so on.
But for those of us with a deskjob in a warm office it’s surely over the top. A heart-attack on a plate!
Never expected to read about the great English fry up in the daily sceptic, but it did bring a smile to my face. So thank you.