Notes Taken from the Breakfast Room

One year (they settled on nineteen seventy three) the sun was so fierce and its light was so fine on the last day of July, that the apples dropped clean off the trees, and the pegs welded on to the line.
They say they’ve never seen colours like those they saw that day; the hens looked like fat jars of marmalade* buzzing with light on a window ledge, the straw could have been woven by Rumpelstiltskin himself, and they couldn’t look up at the sky to say.
When the sun was wedged just above the hill (they like to tell this part the most), they cracked an egg from the Breakfast Room sill and, believe it or not, when they arrived by its side (only ten or eleven stairs down; pitter-patter feet, the scatter of dust, the squawks, the heat) the yolk was as set as it could have been and the underside beginning to brown.


*The cook before last had been quite the trick and, as a rule of thumb, could squeeze an orange dry through the peel; even the jams of strawberry and plum lined up in the parlour, more often than not, would have a citrussy kick- her hands being always so full of the flavour.

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