The Colonel’s Breakfast

 

The Colonel’s Breakfast

I like a gentle, quiet start to the day, with no radio or television to assault my senses.

Frequently, I am the first human to go downstairs, usually because one or more of the non-humans requires access to the great outdoors.

 I enjoy the morning stillness, the false sense of being the only one awake in the world. I like the quiet as the house stretches and comes to life and the feeling of organisation and accomplishment as little tasks are completed. I appreciate the time of the day that is entirely mine, with no expectations or requests.

 I am not a morning person, but I am no longer a night owl. I’m more of a middle-of-the-afternoon person now.

Barry and I both have a robust sense of humour, but my funny bone doesn’t work early in the day. Like most couples, we have developed a verbal shorthand and ‘the Colonel’s breakfast’ is one that we often use. It means that, although not immersed in doom and gloom, I am not ready to engage in light-hearted banter. Barry has always been able to make me laugh, but his skills are wasted first thing in the morning.

‘The Colonel’s breakfast’ arises from Barry’s time as a subaltern living in an officers’ mess with several other young officers. The colonel in question, N.P., had been an officer in the Parachute Regiment who had jumped into Arnhem in 1944 during the Second World War.

After the war he gained an Oxbridge accelerated double first (accelerated usually means two years) Many military personnel were sent to university after the war in an attempt to reintroduce them to civilian life, or to allow them to continue studies disrupted by their war-time service.

 After university and still in the army, N.P. worked on advanced technologies for the networking of radio communications, a precursor to the technologies used today for mobile networks. In the early sixties he was given command of a regiment and Barry was one of his subalterns.

 He was a gentleman who disliked being disturbed at breakfast. Any chatter was frowned upon. Breakfast was a short, informal meal and his desire for peace and quiet was acknowledged and respected, for after all, he had done his duty and done it well.