This is still my stuff.

Been meaning to try the breakfasts at this well-regarded Italian café for years (though obviously not as many years as the place has been waiting for me to show up - “est. 1900”!) - to my shame, I never managed to make it down there while I was working just up the road in Shoreditch. Went there Friday morning to break fast with John Z who’s moving to an amazing job in Georgia. Bacon sausage mushrooms beans and toast. Job's a good ’un. Good luck John.

I knew less of Bacon before visiting the current exhibition of his work at Tate Britain than I did about Rothko, and while I can't say it had as powerful an effect on me, it's an impressive array of work, and a well-constructed exhibition.

Bacon's forthright use of structure, background and the “space-frames” featuring for example in various of his Studies after Velázquez’s "Pope Pius X” highlight the contrast of his protagonists’ emotional and physical urges with the constraints of their emotional and physical environments, both enabling and heightening his visceral evocations of how transitory are rage and angst against the carcass-likeness of our corporeal forms, and how transitory in turn are those forms, electrified briefly by some primal spark, simultaneously supremely vulnerable and supremely powerful in their ability to exploit that vulnerability, whether in themselves or in others of their kind, collapsing ultimately either through such exploitation or the passage of time into dilapidation and decay.

As the exhibition guide relates, “Explaining the explicit violence of his third triptych in 1965, [Bacon] simply stated, ‘Well, of course, we are meat. We are potential carcasses.’” You got it right there, Francis.

I very rarely order liver in restaurants because frankly it’s just so easy to fuck up. However having eaten some extremely good steak at Unico in Epping before, it struck me during today’s visit that their chef might well know if not his actual onions then at least his offal. While it certainly could have been a little rarer, it certainly wasn’t ruined, and the choice of cure on the bacon, though I don’t know what it was, complemented the strong liver flavour very nicely. In summary: not bad.

That's it, I've decided. I don't like tomatoes with a cooked breakfast. Yes, I know that's something of a momentous decision for me to announce so unexpectedly, and one which some may feel warrants further discussion, but I'm serious about this. It's just not what I want. Allow me, if you will, to elaborate.

For me, breakfast is all about glue, slime, stodge. Bulk. The raw materials of a daily grind; high-octane fuel for our high-intensity enterprise. None of your existential doubt drawn from a slightly translucent, watery, roof-of-your-mouth-burning superfluous component for me. It's got to be solid; in an ideal world a poached or fried egg would be mercilessly punctured, allowing its lustrous golden goo to cement its comrades' companionship before they get anywhere the cakehole - yea, I say unto you, even on the plate - but given that this world is far from the Ideal, I say that the salivatory effect induced by tomatoes' aqueous gunge is AN INADEQUATE SUBSTITUTE, and, frankly, I'd rather do without.

Naysay me all thou wilt; I'll countenance none of your pish, nor any of your tosh, and there, Sir, and there, Madam, is an end on't.