The Breakfast Hunter

"Ahhh, I love living in a third world metropolitan capital city..." d muttered.
It's a sentiment she's been known to express once or twice before - when, for example, a staple ingredient the world over is unavailable here, or when, for instance, we see signs that promise superstores open 24 hours, and then in the  smaller print, giving opening times between 10-8.

This morning, after our regulation couple of hours of bed-gibber, it was all about breakfast. Luckily, we have a great little family-run tasty-omeletting portugese cafe a couple of hundred yards away from us. Unfortunately, they were closed.

"Let's have an Adventure," said d.
"Alrighty," I agreed, knowing that the main thing waiting for me back at home was work that I didn't manage to get done on Friday. We jumped on a bus and headed east, with nothing on our mind but finding another little family-run cafe. We ended up in Beckton, and wandered around East Ham Broadway.
"There's one," I said, spotting the word "cafe" down a side street. "Can't vouch for it though, looks a bit...erm...neon..."
"Oh, there's bound to be something up the road," she said.
"Yeah," I agreed, and we walked on.

Nada. Nothing but Halal butchers and closed shops. We walked about a mile, getting progressively more desperate.
"Let's have another Adventure," I said, hearing the mutuality of our stomach-growls. We got on another bus.
We were heading into the middle of not-exactly-nowhere, and we went past a Brewer's Fayre pub.
"Breakfast" it said.
We rang the bell.
"Way to go mom-and-pop," I muttered as we walked through the doors of the chain pub.
"Don't care," said d. "Breakfast,"
"Good point," I agreed.
"Good morning," said the cheery Eastern European girl. "Did you pre-book?"
"Noooo," we almost chortled, a little snobbishly, at the idea that anyone would bother.
"Ah. Well...there are only three minutes of breakfast service left," she said. "If you ask me..."
We hadn't. d turned and left, and I followed. d, ravenous by this time, kicked the door.
"What do you have to do in this town to get breakfast?" she muttered. "D'you have to stalk your own toast or something? Make your own sausages?"
I said nothing - it's a sore point - d wants a sausage-maker in the same sort of way as I want a publisher, having discovered that British sausage, as she eloquently puts it, has the consistency of 'boneless baby-fingers'.

"There's an ASDA over there" I said, shrugging.
"They might have a cafe!" she declared.

Clearly, we'd now abandoned any thought of mom-and-pop, of quality food, of giving a toss - the only reason we didn't just turn right round and come home, I think, was that we were on an Adventure, dammit!

We nodded, wordlessly, and struck out across the road. There were people clustering around the entrance.
"Oh wait," she said.
"It's a Sunday, isn't it?"
"Ohhhh sonofa..." I muttered. We were in the Dead Zone. In Britain, Breakfast stops serving at 10.30. Lunch doesn't start serving till 12. For some reason vaguely connected to licensing laws and not pissing off the churchgoers any more than it absolutely necessary, British supermarkets don't open to paying customers until 11.
I half expected it to start pissing down with rain at this point, just to put the clincher on our morning out.

Fortunately, as we approached, the crowd of bargain-hunters dispersed indoors. There's a cute little niche the supermarkets have cottoned on to - they can't legally sell anything till 11 o'clock - but they can let people in and get them filling up their baskets ahead of that, so they open their doors at 10.30 for "browsers".

Again, d's not wrong when she calls London a third world metropolitan capital city - it's this weird halfway house between sophistication and backwardness, opulence and austerity.

Anyway, they let us in, and fortunately, because their cafe is just a cafe, not a licensed retailer, we could head straight there, our stomachs by this time yawning with anticipation.
It's pretty much motorway-food you get at these places - by which I mean after a couple of mouthfuls, you want to wander out into traffic and beg people to hit you with a BMW. Tasteless chunks of yellow that are allegedly scrambled eggs, baked beans with a thicker skin than many Hollywood celebrities, sausages that, I will admit, had no particular  texture to speak of and the flavours of pepper and wet cardboard, and positively anorexic toast. The guy at the counter also rather took against my girl when she asked for a double-portion of the nauseating eggs, and later checked with his colleague that we'd paid for them both.

"Are we done with the Adventure now?" I begged, dipping a piece of dry toast into her bean-juice.
"Next weekend, you're getting oatmeal," she muttered, darkly.

What else is to say today - I weighed early, and was pleased with my progress, but since then, have been relatively paranoid - not wanting to lose the progress in the space of the next thirty-six hours. Having said that, I've munched my way through a lot of my graze-mix today. I'm now working to ensure that I don't get paranoid and mental trying to work out how many caloriessworth of nuts and raisins and suchlike I've sucked down. This week I've been relatively unconcerned - hadn't weighed at all since Tuesday till, I think, a couple of days ago, and then again today, and I have to say, relative freedom from the insanity of numbers has been great. Not gonna submit to all that palaver at this point. But I have done my 500 caloriesworth of biking, and I'm planning to hit the road again tomorrow morning at Dawn o'clock, just to tip the balance a little in favour of maintaining progress.And no, before you ask, I haven't reached the four-stone mark, I'm just enjoying the sense of working and walking and pushing the damn numbers down again.

So on to tomorrow. Adventure-free, hopefully...