Neves, whom I had met on a train from Delhi to Goa, had come to stay for a few days in England. I was still living with my parents then and they gave him the spare room. On his first morning, I had made him a cooked breakfast which he seemed to enjoy. The next morning, he came down before me. My mother was in the kitchen and, according to her version of events, said brightly, “Good morning Neves. Would you like cereal or toast for breakfast?” His reply, which has gone down in family folklore, “Actually I prefer bacon or ham with an egg fried on both sides.”
My grandfather, too, liked his cooked breakfast and a family legend about him also concerns a demand by him for a certain kind of breakfast in a foreign land. In his case, it was France, with the family. This would have been in the nineteen fifties or sixties. There were, unsurprisingly, no menus on the table and only slices of bread, unsalted butter and apricot jam. When the waitress came over to take orders for coffee (no doubt), Grandfather, loudly, slowly and painfully asked her: “Could you do ham and eggs?"
In neither case can I tell you what happened next.
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