Whether you measure your life in coffee cups or cereal bowls there is an inherent poetry to breakfast. It’s the start of the day, something sort of intimate. While your college may serve breakfast daily, it tends to be a meal reserved for kitchens or bedrooms: alone, with friends or on the opposite side of the table to that boy with whom you share a staircase and occasional, awkward eye contact.

In a term of rushed meals and precious time, it’s easy just to grab that pack of Huel and avoid the joy of carefully cutting a banana into your bowl, deliberating over which form of egg you’ll make, or choosing what to put on your slice of bread. All I ask is that you luxuriate in the brief period of time that it takes to chomp through a piece of toast or inhale a bowl of porridge. You may not be hungry early in the morning or may not like the immediately obvious foods on offer, but there’s certainly something to be said for sitting down in the morning and getting a bit of sustenance and serenity. Plus, breakfast gives you a little boost, propelling you into the day with gusto and energy, so you’ll probably do your day better with a little bit of fuel (rather than Huel) in the tank.

So, I’m going to take this moment to give a good old-fashioned shout-out to the best breakfasts around. Let’s start with the simple, easily accessible and low-effort dishes and get increasingly complex as we go.

“In what seems like fate, one of my brothers nicknames me ‘porridge.’ This is sadly not due to my recent rise in popularity in contemporary café culture, nor is it due to my Celtic hardiness, it is instead a reference to my mentality.”

For the day to day, if you lack courage or a sense of adventure: Weetabix, milk, banana and raisins. Get your compact piece of card-boardy grains (aka the Weetabix) and throw on a dash of milk, artfully sprinkle some raisins and banana medallions and boom, you have yourself a delicious combination. It’s bloody good – there’s no point denying it.

And if cereal just doesn’t cut the proverbial mustard: grab a bagel (more like yay-gel!) of any flavour, cinnamon and raisin, plain, sesame etc., and lavishly spread with butter to create a halo of deliciousness. Simple but divine. Inhaling that celestial ring is clearly going to get your day off to a glorious start.

In what seems like fate, one of my brothers nicknames me ‘porridge.’ This is sadly not due to my recent rise in popularity in contemporary café culture, nor is it due to my Celtic hardiness, it is instead a reference to my mentality. Apparently, I have more porridge in my skull than brain. While he perhaps thought that it was a subtle insult, I have taken it in my stride and interpreted it as nick-nominative determinism, or destiny that I would find my niche as a breakfast correspondent. But enough about me, more about porridge. It’s a classic, it’s been knocking around in mid-morning stomachs for centuries and shows no sign of losing its success. You can do anything with it: add fruit, add salt (bizarre, but people do it), use any type of milk to cater for your diet, put in some peanut butter: you name it, you can do it. While it can look like vomit, it also has the potential to be very aesthetically pleasing. So, go forth and porridge!

When it comes to the special occasion breakfasts, there are some clear front-runners. First and foremost, the bacon butty. A little cloud of bread stuffed with bacon (more like yay-con!) and streaked with ketchup – or the condiment of your choice – is frankly delightful. It is a taste accompanied by memories of surviving hangovers, watching rugby matches or rushing dinners, in a good way, though...

And finally, the most luxurious of the breakfast foods discussed so far: French toast. Pillows of sweet, eggy bread, accompanied by fruit, some kind of syrup and hopefully heaps of cinnamon; nothing can beat it. Known as ‘French toast’ in the Anglophone world, ironically the French call it ‘pain perdu’, literally meaning lost bread. Who lost this bread? Where has it been lost? In what sense is it lost? If anything, this mystery and the many unanswered questions surrounding the breakfast food inspire consumption, adhering to my philosophy to eat fun food.

As this breakfast column is drawing to a close, I’m going to do some good old-fashioned musing. I had many dreams: to write about something relatively trivial and silly that people would read, to work out whether there’s a correlation between loving golden nuggets and being a fan of chicken nuggets (this one sadly fell by the wayside, but I’m convinced that there’s something pretty interesting and important there) and to fight breakfast scepticism. I don’t think I’ve really fought for ‘the cause’ or anything, or that it’s a particularly important area for activism, but I hope that people are more likely to either eat breakfast (because it’s delicious and very varied) or to change up what they normally go for. One of my friends has started eating cereal, having thought that hummus or sun-dried tomatoes were appropriate breakfast foods for her whole life, so that’s good. I just hope people marvel in their breakfast foods and their choice – taking a moment in the morning can make your day bloody good.

The Cereal Offender: Breakfast – a health issue?

So, I suppose a pretty key thing to do is to say thank you. I have actually learned a whole host of facts about the breakfast world and really enjoyed people telling me that they also love remembering toast (for some reason, the whole toast malarkey has really become a jewel in my breakfast-based crown) or that they read it. Not actually living in proximity to the Varsity readership has meant that I forget that other people will read this, so I have become increasingly lavish and ridiculous with my topics. I would also like to thank the poor souls with various food intolerances for commenting on the articles about the joy of their previous lives of bread and dairy aplenty. A special mention goes to a comment from a certain individual who has exactly the same name as me. I have never met another Xanthe, let alone another Xanthe Fuller, and it was clearly fate that this breakfast column should bring us together.

And, much like finishing a bowl of cereal, I’m sad that this column is over so soon and wish I could do it all over again, but I’m also ready for the day ahead and for bigger and better things. Maybe I’ll go for seconds in the future, but for now I’m pretty content. So, cheers, I’ve had a bowl (!)