Remember When Toast Didn’t Have Avocado Smeared All Over It?
Remember When Toast Didn’t Have Avocado Smeared All Over It?
Toast on the Isle of Wight
While moving through the town of Cowes at a pace usually reserved for dawdling teenagers, the ‘Well Bread’ shopfront enticed all of our appetites equally.
In the 18 years since we first met in a little commuter town outside London, my school friends and I have all taken dramatically divergent directions in life. After a decade of Christmastime catch-ups over syrupy coffees, we decided to celebrate our 30th birthdays collectively, and so ended up just off the southern coast of England on the Isle of Wight, happily forsaking cocktails and loud music for ice creams and rambling walks.
It takes on hour on the ferry from Southampton to cross the thin, shallow strip of water known as the Solent, enough time for a cup of watery tea before you arrive. Thanks to a trend set by Queen Victoria in the 1800s, the diamond-shaped island is usually teeming with holidaying families during school vacations, and boasts sandy beaches, a donkey sanctuary, and a garlic farm, among its many charms.
Pushing open the bakery door, we were greeted from behind the counter with the same gaze that we’d get as teenagers buying chocolate at the local newspaper shop: somewhere between disdain, disinterest, and familiarity. The little shop’s shelves heaved precariously with loaves of all kinds alongside wide, flat trays of school-dinner-style traybakes draped in thick icing. The floor space was taken up by long wooden bench tables.
Among the many shades of brown, I noticed a dish with two big, bright blocks of moderately mauled butter sitting in front of a couple, now deep into their breakfast at the end of one of the benches. Eyeing the brown paper bag signs which served as menus, I discovered the ‘all you can eat toast’ option, and so we sat down, equipped with our own loaf.
The bread was fresh and fragrant, the butter salty and softened, and to crown it there was an array of jams to be explored.
On no other occasion, in a world which seems to have turned on bread as a carbohydrate-rich enemy, would I have permitted such reckless abandon with the familiar. Breakfast toast is boring, and in London, my home city, now only acceptable in sourdough form smeared with mandatory avocado.
Holiday eating is for sampling little bites of the rare and the exotic, is it not?
At some point a second loaf appeared, and so we carried on, enjoying the simple pleasures. The perfect celebration of friendships ever-present, but now rarely indulged.