Jacques Chirac, when president of France, is said to have provoked peals of laughter from both Vladimir Putin and Gerhard Schroeder, his opposite numbers at the heads of the Russian and French governments at the time, by asking, of the British, how you could trust a people whose cuisine was so bad.
Although Chirac may have been unfairly tarring the whole country with the same brush, he was right as far as Margaret Thatcher was concerned. Her dietary regime – released under the 30-year rule and re-published in full in her fansheet, aka the Daily Mail – has to be seen to be believed.
She began every Monday morning with two slices of grapefruit, a boiled egg – the first of a staggering 28 eggs she would eat over the course of a single week – and a cup of black coffee or tea. So much about the word “grapefruit” is exciting, containing as it does two of the most exciting words in food: “grape” and “fruit”. The more accurate name for grapefruit, of course, is “the worst and least appealing of all the citruses” – and the clear tea did nothing to improve the experience.
Monday lunch gave me an unpleasant feeling of déjà vu: it was two boiled eggs and some grapefruit. Monday dinner included a mysterious meal known as “combination salad”. Perhaps this refers to the combination of incredulity, anger and despair I felt upon realising that I would be eating grapefruit and eggs for the third meal in succession, with only a piece of dry toast to liven things up.
Breakfast on Tuesday is … you guessed it, grapefruit and eggs. I don’t think anyone has ever been as happy to eat a tomato as I was that Tuesday, when the grind of grapefruit and eggs was broken up by tomato (and yet more eggs). Dinner is a surprisingly varied meal of steak, cucumber, lettuce, olives and coffee. History does not record if the coffee was served as a drink or as a jus, but I decide to assume the former (decaff, so I can get to sleep easily). I head to bed, where I have bad dreams about grapefruit.
On Wednesday morning, I crack – both literally and metaphorically. Literally, I crack two eggs for the usual breakfast of eggs and grapefruit. Metaphorically, I decide that enough is enough. I’ll stick to eating what I want, thank you very much.