Breakfast of Champions

It’s breakfast time.

I’m sitting here reading an article in the Daily Mail which says that sitting down really does give you a “fat behind”. Apparently “chronic pressure on the buttocks” accelerates growth of “liquid droplets”, molecules that “carry fats”.

 Hmm. Since starting my course I’ve noticed that my own has expanded exponentially further than my writing career. But I can’t write on an empty stomach. Bit of a Catch-22 situation really. Damned fat if I eat, damned useless at writing if I don’t.

I’m looking at packets of Corn Flakes left over from Variety Packs (they always are, aren’t they). As I gaze at the rooster image on the front I am transported, in a Proustian haze, back to the top of the shed in my parents’ garden in South Wales, watching the antics of the chickens in the little field beyond. My grandfather bred them.

One summer rats, feasting on the chicken feed, became the top dogs of this community. My grandfather’s solution was to mix concrete and pour it into the rat holes around the shed. How those rodents must have laughed their heads off as they simply dug out another exit. My father had had enough. I held one end of the hosepipe whilst he, like some avenging Pied Piper with a shovel, decapitated them as they poured out of the remaining escape hole.

My father won that one.

There are tensions in all family relationships. The pecking order amongst the chickens was quite clear however. The cockerel was very much in charge. Bit of a nasty bit of work, he used to attack an old hen past her egg laying prime.

Relations between my grandfather and the cockerel were bad. Really bad. My grandfather’s solution was a wooden stick onto which he had nailed a full cut out side of a large packet of Corn Flakes emblazoned with the Kellogg’s rooster. I spent many an entertaining morning on top of the shed watching him wave that thing at the enraged cockerel as he scattered the feed. 

One day he forgot to take his flag.

He came back to the house, badly shaken and his hands bleeding from the talons of the cockerel. My father saw red. 

I dashed out behind him, scrambled up on the shed and watched a sight which has stayed with me all these years.

My father was chasing the cockerel (squawking wildly and shedding feathers) around the field and whacking its back with his bare hands. The cockerel never really recovered its chutzpah after that. 

My father won that one, as well.

Back to the present and to breakfast.

Hm, maybe the cardboard is less calorific than the flakes themselves? 

Didn’t they do an experiment on that once? 

Stuff it. I’ll follow Fay Weldon who advised us for years to “go to work on an egg”. She became a successful writer, hope for me yet...

 I bin the old Corn Flakes, open the fridge, get out the pan and start frying.