How pleasurable to look back from this autumnal vantage-point to the piping days of summer! The endless sun-kissed afternoons. The glad cries of little children on the golden sands. Tarquin and Jocasta dancing on the terrace in the moonlight above a wine-dark sea, writes Godfrey Fitzsimons.
The sights and smells and sensations of foreign climes. The hotel breakf. . . Aaaaarrrgghhh! (Sorry, this is hard for me. Try again.) The. . .hotel. . .
breakfast. . . BUFFET! (Made it!)
Holiday apartment-renters (self-catering, ugh!) might not know of this pestilence, so pull up a chair, and I will explain. It used to be the ritzier hotels that offered this so-called facility, but like so many things these days it has suffered prole-drift and has moved downmarket in the hospitality industry.
Time was when you'd go into the dining-room of your modest hotel, and a waitress would come and take your breakfast order and serve it in the fullness of time. No more. Now, when you stagger in bleary-eyed, you're confronted by an array of assorted groceries on central tables, seductively displayed in baskets and glass jugs and on hot plates, and you're invited to help yourself.
The advantage of this arrangement for the hotel is that fewer staff are required; for the punters the selling point is that they can stuff their faces to bursting-point for a fixed price. But such seemingly democratic processes always have a downside, and in this instance it is that the prospect of open-ended morning grubstakes produces a startling transformation in people you might otherwise assume to be prosperous, delightfully middle-class, and therefore civilised.
Fat chance. Faced with this cornucopia of gastronomic riches these sophisticates turn into nothing short of ravening wolves. Get in the way of a Frenchwoman with orange skin bent on filling her cake-hole with scrambled egg or a stout Dutch burgher in a look-at-me-I'm-on-holiday shirt with his piggy eyes fixed on the cheese or cooked meats platter, and you risk being trampled into the deep-pile.
To make matters worse, you are suffering from the kind of acute disequilibrium that such infinite variety provokes in those of us who are happiest concentrating on one thing at a time. So, after a few minutes' orientation (bread rolls and toast nor'-nor'-east, cereals due south, juices north-by-north-west) you home in, to start assembling the components of your breakfast. Then, balancing your choice of comestibles in both hands, you beat against the current back to your table, avoiding that Italian woman with just the hint of a moustache making her second trip (or is it her third?) to the cheese table.
You sink with relief into your chair, quaff your juice and reach for the cereal spoon. There isn't one. The knife, fork and coffee spoon are all present and correct in their appointed place on the table, but the cereal spoon is AWOL. You furtively check neighbouring tables to see if they are similarly bereft, and indeed they are.
So back you track to the cereals table, and there they lurk, the little spoony rascals, a serried line of them peeping coyly from an enveloping linen cloth. Why this cutlery apartheid? Why won't the cereal spoon associate with the other implements in the place-setting, until it's made to? Funny, the milk-jug appears to be missing from the table, too. How can you eat muesli without milk? Oh, madame, s'il vous plaît! Comment? Oh, le milk-jug est sur la central table, is it? Of course it is! Silly me! Back you go. . .
After the muesli marathon the croissant melts deliciously in the hot coffee (oh, yes, indeed, dunking is absolutely de rigueur in even the most hoity-toity of Continental caravanserais). And there's your pert little pot of jam, just waiting to spread itself languorously on the crisp-crusted roll. But you forgot the butter. So back you track yet again. . .
With practice and hard experience all this morning misery can be conquered. Strategies can be devised to meet it head on. The real irritant of the buffet scenario is if you're a person of small matutinal appetite, as I am. Not for me the eggs, the bacon strips, the unclassifiable Continental sliced sausage with suspicious white bits in it, the holey cheese. Give me a glass of OJ, possibly but not necessarily a bowl of cereal, a croissant and a fresh-baked roll, and I'm as happy as a sandboy, whatever that is.
But what makes my gorge rise is that I'm still asked to pay the same as those gorgers of ham, sausage, eggs, cheese, bacon and more sausage ("I don't mind if I do!").
But I have found the answer. It consists of two short words: room service. Oh, I can already hear you tutting such words as "unnecessary extravagance", "shameful self-indulgence", "lazy sod" and so on. Listen, for only a couple of euro extra, if you're a modest breakfaster like me, there's usually a Continental breakfast choice available in room service as well as the full Monty, unlike in the restaurant downstairs, and it's invariably cheaper. Also, if you're a cheapskate like me, you can squirrel some of the rolls, cheese and ham away in your bag to use as lunch later.
No, I will not apologise for being such a tightwad. I see it as a kind of virtuous vengeance on the hotel for trying to screw an exorbitant fee out of me for a breakfast I don't want. Yes, revenge can be sweet indeed, sweet as a breakfast croissant dunked in coffee. But dunked in my own room, far from that grunting, jostling, swigging piggery downstairs.