Patience at breakfast

Not that I'm an lover of eggs, I rarely go to work on one and, despite an occasional hankering for bread fried delectably crisp and brown in bacon fat, for years have avoided that artery-blocker known to hoteliers as Full English breakfast, but one of the best things about breakfast in London is a well-poached egg.  Atop a flake or two of smoked salmon and part of what was called a healthy breakfast - muesli with berries, beetroot and carrot juice and fresh fruit - the poached egg I ate each morning at our London hotel was a real treat, except, that is, for the batty idea of serving it in a glass bowl.

Once, whilst traipsing around the wilds of Pennsylvania, the Celt, in one of those moments that make even partners of thirty-odd years mildly breathless with wonder, announced that the silicone egg poaching cups he'd just found were what he'd been searching for for ever. Given we haven't been inside a kitchen store for years, and eat between us no more than a half-a-dozen eggs a year and, if there were poaching to be done, I would be the one cussing doing it, I pondered, as one well might, the meaning of it all.

The tedium of standing over a pan of quivering water pretending that one even needs to produce an aesthetic egg has meant, as you might imagine, that the poaching cups, loll, unused, in a drawer with all the other must-haves no longer loved. Actually, my problem with them is that I can taste the silicone on the egg and so they are ostracized, much as are the eggs they're designed to hold.

This weekend we are in Manhattan to see Gilbert and Sullivan's, and the Celt's beloved, Patience at Symphony Space, and to visit with family and friends. Breakfast, rarely eaten in hotel dining rooms, for neither of us, will be an egg.