A Breakfast of Champions

Bonjour cheminées vomissements

In honour of the Indomitable Lions, Cameroon, who I picked out of the 2nd office sweep, despite chanting BRAAAZILLL, over and over again as I dipped into the tin, which was still holding all the bookies favourites at that time. Never mind, Uruguay and Cameroon, even at my most generous, they are dark horses so dark, that no light escapes from them at all, they are an equine black hole, but at least I didn't get North Korea, Honduras or England.

It was a happy reunion with Cameroon for me, its a favourite place of mine, and contrary to what you might think, it has some of the best food in all of Central Africa, the French influence very much to the fore, with dainty little patisseries on the street corners of Douala. You cant stop and taste any of it of course, in case you get robbed/shot/hacked/raped/kidnapped or have a burning car tyre thrown over your head.

Still, anything I could have picked up in Douala, or even in the street cafes of Paris itself, couldn't have compared to the sheer quality of my dining today. I ate like the Sun-King himself.

Breakfast, the most important meal of the day they say, and I wasn't taking any chances, I grabbed a croissant from the Tescos Metro around the corner and a bottle of full fat Irn-Bru to wash it down. A bit of a nod to the Auld Alliance their, our friends across the sea. To be honest, this breakfast that the Jacobite Princes would have been chuffed to get, couldn't be enjoyed as I'd hoped. I rounded the corner to the bus stop as the 181 came lurching into view, like an overloaded Phillipinnes ferry. So I had to run, with flaky pastry flying behind me between bites and my bottle of Irn Bru getting dangerously jostled to a state of fizzy fulmination.

So, after a breakfast like that, Lunch was always going to struggle to come close to satisfying my new Regally demanding taste buds. But Rafael the office sandwich boy came up trumps, continuing the French theme, a baguette with cheese and tomato had me patting my tummy like Louie XIV, only slightly spoiled with Branston pickle.

Still, I had dinner to look forward too, and what else could suffice, after eating like a renaissance regal all day, than a Beef and Tomato Pot Noodle, or to be more precise, a Golden Wonder Noodle. A new entrant into the cut throat market of instant noodles in a plastic pot. If blandness and tastelessness is the benchmark of this particular segment of cuisine, then we may have a new contender, but then, it would be hard to tell. However, I did wash it down with the cheapest bottle of red in the shop, no vineyard on the label, not even a region where the grapes were grown, unless Australian counts as a region. But, if you blend something enough, it ends up tasting alright, and the bottle could be made into a nice lamp.

As I mentioned, breakfast was snatched from my local Tesco Metro this morning, and I couldn't help but notice a great big sticker on the floor of the threshold, proudly proclaiming this very shop to be England's official world cup supermarket. Now, I'm not one to criticise England's world cup preparations, but is a Tesco Metro, in South East London, not a little inconvenient for Ruistenburg, and to be honest, Tesco Metro doesn't really carry the product lines to satisfy 23 young multi millionaires. I mean not one Louis Vuitton man bag or Vertu mobile phone ( which is really a Nokia wrapped in £6000 of leather by the way,if that's even possible) can be found anywhere. I haven't seen any of them in there once, which would appear to reinforce my suspicion, that this may be some kind of marketing ploy.

I suspect that England football players continue to shop only in supermarkets stocked exclusively for them, where everything they don't buy is immediately crushed and sent to a special millionaires, high security land fill site, by virgin staff drawn from the most beautiful specimens of each racial group. Who, after serving these embodiments of perfection, are taken out, loaded into cattle carts and taken to an underground football stadium to have their memories erased. Probably.

Lang may yer lum reek.