Yesterday morning I discovered the secret of life: breakfast pastries. Before that, I thought the secret of life was butter. Now I know it's butter plus sugar.
I imagine many of you already know this. I am clearly a slow developer. This is probably connected with the fact that I grew up in Yorkshire, where breakfast (weekends) was bacon and eggs or (on school days) cereal in summer and porridge in winter. Both with appropriate volumes of tea, that is, enough to sink a battleship.
When I left home I mostly couldn't afford breakfast. Since I've been able to afford to eat almost anything I want when I get up I tend to stick to eggs with toast or fruit (work days), fish (trout! yum!--leisure days), and massively exotic decadence (a ten-course South-meets-history-of-England extravaganza with ten of my best friends and two dozen bottles of champagne; it lasted eleven hours--high days and holidays).
But that's by the by.
Monday night/Tuesday morning I had occasion to remark to Kelley that I had a yen for something...different. I fell into a reverie about croissants and scones I have known. (Usually encountered in hotels.) I fell asleep and dreamt of fatty farinaceous objects.
When I woke up Tuesday morning, magic had visited the kitchen. In the centre of the table was my favourite plate (you don't have a favourite plate? you need to learn to live) laden with, well, deliciousness. Croissants, turnovers, and other oddly shaped things I have no name for. (One looked like a strange bivalve.) I gaped. Kelley looked terribly pleased with herself. I looked terribly pleased with Kelley. Some time later, we weighed a few pounds more and felt terribly, terribly pleased with each other and life in general. And then, on a sugar and endorphin high, I wrote a zillion words of Hild. And then the sun came out. The world just glittered. And one of our day lilies bloomed. In November.
Clearly I've been operating under a disadvantage all these years. I now know that if I eat butter, sugar, and white wheat I can probably write three novels a year. I might die young but, damn, I'll die smiling.
For the record, my favourite was a peach croissant. My least favourite was a chocolate croissant. If you're going to eat chocolate for breakfast, it should either be chocolate cloud cake or Champagne truffles.
But, also for the record, any breakfast, or none at all, is just fine if I'm at the table with Kelley.
