The delights of breakfast, lunch and dinner in bed

Nov 7 2007 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

WHOEVER said you can’t have too much of a good thing should be forced to travel everywhere in a Sedan chair and eat only caviar and fois gras.

They’d soon be dying to stretch his legs with a brisk walk to buy a light salad.

Celebrity chef Jean Christophe Novelli has decreed that November be “Breakfast in Bed Month” because, like many good ideas, waking up a loved one with a pot of Darjeeling and a croissant is a treat that rarely makes it past the planning stage.

It may be a feature of the early stages of a relationship – Champagne and strawberries on a tray for Valentine’s Day, homemade marmalade on toast for birthdays perhaps.

But then you reach the stage when you revert back to choosing underwear for comfort, rather than sex appeal, and suddenly you’re grabbing a burnt offering as you dash out of the door to work.

This, it seems, is a common problem. According to the former Hell’s Kitchen contender, more than half of Brits have not partaken in breakfast in bed for more than a year.

Novelli used to take a large plate of croissants to his parents’ bedroom, where he and his two brothers would help devour them – the croissants, not his parents – so feels it should become a more regular part of life.

All very well for him, who no doubt has a special French vacuum cleaner that manages to suck up every crumb from the duvet, but take it from me, the novelty can definitely wear off.

When you live in a house that has bare plaster and flaking paint on all the downstairs walls, you have no choice but to eat breakfast in the bedroom.

In fact, not only do we currently have to take our breakfasts upstairs, but we also have to eat lunch and dinner perched on the end of the bed with the plate balanced on one knee.

Entire meals have to be planned around whether or not they can be consumed easily – soup is obviously out, as is anything that involves forceful cutting, and we have been living on a spaghetti-free diet ever since we nearly turned the freshly painted walls into a scene from Hostel.

Once you’ve got toast crumbs down your cleavage for the fifteenth time, you do start to wonder why you’re effectively living in a bedsit when you’ve just bought a three-bedroom house.

Of course, we would probably be dining in style by now, in a room with a brand new fireplace and polished wooden floor, if I didn’t spend more time procrastinating over doing the work than actually getting down to it.

Although it feels like I’ve spent the past 12 billion weekends decorating, if you were to add up the hours of actual work it would probably be less time than I spent in the shower.

Procrastination is definitely a favourite human pastime. I expect the reason archaeologists have found so many cave paintings is because the troglodytes were using them as an excuse to delay their pursuit of a woolly mammoth.

Cave paintings, in that case, must have been a prehistoric version of the revision timetable – that wonderful invention that can bend the time-space continuum to make it appear that you are doing work vital to passing impending examinations when you’re really reliving childhood memories of the art corner.

Since moving house, I have discovered several grown-up versions of the illustrated revision timetable.

There is the “sweeping leaves from the front path”, also known as “avoiding washing down the walls with sugar soap”, but the best one of all has to be the hanging basket. We may have only just conquered central heating and we may still have the living room to paint with just two weeks to go before our new sofas arrive, but at least we have a basket of wilting plants on show at the front of the house.

And while procrastinating over calling up a plumber, I have at least had time to solve the dining situation.

From now on, I shall be serving up all meals on the stairs.

lauradavis@dailypost.co.uk