TOM UTLEY: I dream of gobbling down a full English. So why do I solely have espresso and cigarettes for breakfast each day?

For me, the great joy of staying in a rural B&B or country hotel is the thought of a slap-up full English breakfast in the morning. The thought of it, mind, but never the reality.

I go to bed at night with visions of the culinary delight awaiting me when I wake: orange juice, toast and butter, Oxford marmalade, farm-fresh fried eggs and succulent local bacon, with that mouth-watering aroma which has proved a temptation too far for so many would-be vegetarians.

Add a sausage or two, a grilled tomato, mushrooms from the neighbouring woods and perhaps a little black pudding, with a steaming pot of tea to wash it all down, and my dream of the treat I never get at home is complete.

But come the morning, I stumble down to the breakfast room, bleary-eyed and only half-awake, to survey the feast on offer… and invariably, I find that I just can’t face it.

No, I have to accept that I’ll always be one of the 12 per cent identified by a survey this week who never have breakfast – unless you count the endless cups of coffee and cigarettes with which I habitually start my day.

Sacred

Apart from my fellow abstainers, some 47 per cent spend a mere ten minutes or less on the meal, finds Kellogg’s Great British Breakfast Audit, while 76 per cent multi-task as they eat, focusing on work, emails, social media or getting the children ready for school.

So much for Britons’ adherence to the advice of the late American writer, John Gunther: ‘All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast.’

Of course, Gunther is far from the only sage who has sung the praises of breakfast as ‘the most important meal of the day’.

‘Breakfast is a beautiful, elegant thing,’ says Jamie Oliver, ‘a meal to be savoured and embraced.’

It is ‘a meal with an incredible emotional charge’, wrote the American chef Anthony Bourdain. ‘It’s a feeling of fellowship that is unlike any other meal of the day.’

(Hmm. Try telling that to the average British couple, scowling over the morning newspapers in stony silence.)

‘Breakfast is everything,’ wrote the novelist and journalist A. A. Gill, ‘the beginning, the first thing. It is the mouthful that is the commitment to a new day.’

Or to quote that most prolific of all writers, Anon: ‘Breakfast is the canvas on which you paint your day’; it’s ‘the bridge that leads us from the quiet of the night to the vibrant energy of the day’; it’s ‘a sacred meal’; it is ‘the foundation for a successful day’.

As for the famous advice of the U.S. nutritionist Adelle Davis (‘Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper’), all I can say is that I turn it on its head: nothing to eat in the morning, a pint and a sandwich at lunchtime and a royal feast in the evening.

So are those of us who miss out on breakfast denying ourselves the best possible start to the day – or perhaps even doing ourselves harm?

Well, experts are hopelessly divided on the subject.

There are some who will tell you that going without breakfast disrupts the circadian rhythms that regulate our body clocks, leading to unhealthy spikes in blood glucose levels after eating later in the day. It may cause obesity, they say.

Indeed, researchers who analysed the health data of 50,000 people over seven years found that those who made breakfast the largest meal of the day tended to have a lower body mass index than those who ate a large lunch or supper.

Concentration

Hence the advice, widely offered to those who are trying to lose weight, that forgoing that first meal of the day could prove counterproductive.

Other champions of a big breakfast say that skipping it has been associated with a 27 per cent higher risk of heart disease, and a substantially increased risk of type-2 diabetes.

They also claim that eating a proper meal first thing in the morning kick-starts our metabolism, making us not only slimmer but more energetic, while boosting our alertness and powers of concentration and memory.

In the opposite camp, however, there are some experts who will tell you that breakfast may actually be bad for you.

Take Professor Terence Kealey, a former vice-chancellor of the private University of Buckingham, who previously lectured in clinical biochemistry at Cambridge University.

He has written a book with the alarming title Breakfast Is A Dangerous Meal (alarming, anyway, to all but the 12 per cent of us who never break our overnight fast until lunchtime).

He writes that having been diagnosed as a type-2 diabetic, he began to notice that his glucose levels were unusually high after eating breakfast. But if he waited to eat until after midday, his glucose levels would be normal.

In the words of the health writer Maria Lally: ‘So began his mission to question what he calls ‘the glorification of breakfast’.’

Professor Kealey was struck in particular by the fact that a great many studies extolling the health benefits of breakfast were funded by cereal manufacturers and others who had a strong vested interest in a market worth tens of billions of pounds every year.

Yet many of the products they sold had absolutely no nutritional value.

Fancy

He also cast doubt on the received wisdom that a substantial breakfast tends to lower our overall daily calorie intake. On the contrary, he said, the opposite could be true.

Meanwhile, others have also found that cutting down on breakfast, or skipping it altogether, can be an aid to losing weight, rather than a hindrance.

Now, please don’t expect me, as a layman totally ignorant of matters dietary and nutritional, to come down on one side or the other in this battle of the squabbling scientists.

All I will say is that by the time we reach our 70s, as I did in 2023, we grow very weary of reading one week that something is bad for us, and the next that it benefits our health.

If you take my advice – which is almost certainly a terrible idea – you’ll have whatever takes your fancy at breakfast time, which in my case means nothing but coffee and cigarettes.

As for that full English breakfast, well, it can always wait until later in the day.

But how I envy those who feel strong enough, first thing in the morning, to tuck into the meal that must surely rank among Britain’s greatest culinary gifts to the world.

Why, even that grumpy old playwright and novelist Somerset Maugham, who took a dim view of our cuisine in general, had to admit that the full English had something wonderful going for it.

So I’ll leave the last word to him. ‘To eat well in England,’ he observed, ‘you should have breakfast three times a day!’