My quest for the perfect breakfast companion

For the first time in my life the business breakfast has been inflicted on me - by a TV tycoon who wished to pick my brains for the fine details of an art-market drama.

It began well with a chauffeured BMW (the whispering V-12, no less), a fine hotel, a cheerful greeting from every desk manned by young men handsome and suave as gigolos, a head waiter immediate in his attendance.

"Full English breakfast, orange juice and coffee," was the command.

"With mushrooms and black pudding?" the response.

"Of course," the answer. I uttered the words: "and toast?"

A flurry of waitresses with the untamed accents of Bulgaria and Bessarabia bore juice and butter to the table, poured coffee. "And toast," I wailed at their departing backs.

The head waiter himself accompanied our breakfasts, the plates borne by doe-eyed boys still damp from the perfumed marble baths of Alma-Tadema. "And toast?" I murmured haplessly.

The eggs were scrambled to perfection, the sausages of lean pork, the tomatoes were sweet and the mushrooms meadow succulent. The head waiter enquired: "Is everything in order?" and was a shade put out by the peremptory note of ingratitude when yet again I said: "And toast?"

Toast was eventually brought, but too little and too late to soak the juices from my plate, two thin crustless slices, hardly even golden. I like toast to be burnt. The three most sensual smells in the world are roasting coffee, burning toast and snuffed beeswax candles in a church - all turn me into a caricatural Bisto kid.

I enjoyed the breakfast well enough, paid for it with tales of the commercial art world's devices and chicaneries, and was swept home in the BMW; but the toast had triggered recollection of another breakfast, years ago in Germany. It was in a hotel in Clausthal-Zellerfeld, where one helped oneself. First down in the morning, I found a toaster and a dozen kinds of bread in shades from Snow White's virgin breast to the pubic regions of the darkest Nubian.

A damp black rye refused to toast; a second stint in the toaster and still it wasn't done; I put it in again and turned my attention to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung until the fire alarm sounded and all hell broke loose.

With the other guests dishevelled and pyjama-clad I was urged to the safety of the forecourt, but in the kerfuffle I had retrieved my toast and stood there nibbling the evidence of misdemeanour.

Ignoring the smell and smoke of toast since there was no sight of it, the mystified firemen sought another cause for the alarm and eventually declared it false. I returned to the breakfast room for second helpings.