Morning After Blues - ice cream for breakfast!

Last night I wrote on Froogville about the odd little ice cream celebration I witnessed among the teenage security guards in the gatehouse to my apartment building, and reminisced a little about my own passion for ice cream. FG commented that ice cream was good at any time, except possibly for breakfast.

This reminded me that I did once eat rather a lot of ice cream for breakfast.

It happened like this.....

During my extended spell as an undergraduate, I gradually amassed quite a number of creature comforts to make my meagre digs more homely - a toaster oven, a microwave, a small fridge, a TV. These were relatively unusual luxuries (the fridge, especially) for a student, and helped to make my room something of a social focal point - particularly in my final year, when I had quite a large and comfortable one, on the 2nd floor of the accommodation block directly across the street from the college chapel. Evenings would quite often start and/or finish there. On a few occasions, we might not even have bothered to go out in the interim. And for some strange reason - despite the fact that their own accommodations were rarely more than a few minutes' stagger away - people quite often ended up crashing out for the night in one of my armchairs, or just on the floor.

The Bookseller was a particularly frequent visitor during that year (he had in fact graduated the previous summer, but was still hanging around - earning beer money from a "temporary" job in a bookshop! - for no better reason, I suspected, than to try to ensure that I would screw up my Final exams). For quite some time there was scaffolding up outside, as the front of the building was being cleaned and repaired; and The Bookseller developed the habit - when he did bother to go home at all, that is - of casually leaving my room through the window and climbing down the scaffolding to the pavement below. I was convinced that when the scaffolding was finally removed, he would one night unthinkingly exit my room through the window and plunge to his death - but fortunately that did not come to pass.

Anyway...... one night he had crashed out on my floor after a particularly late and heavy night of drinking. The next morning, I was awake early-ish (as is my wont - hangover-proof devil that I am), and eager to be off out doing things. But The Bookseller slumbered on, snoring loudly, quite unrousable.

I hit on the idea of trying to jolt him out of his coma with a stirring burst of AC/DC on the hi-fi. And it worked just fine.

Except that Dave the janitor, who lived in a flat immediately below, had a low tolerance for the musical tastes of us students, particularly on a Saturday morning - and whenever he felt that one of us was playing something offensively loud, or just offensive, he would cut the power to the whole building. Usually he would feel that he'd made his point, and relent after 5 or 10 minutes. But that morning, he appeared to have gone out while still in a huff, and left us without electricity for hours.

I had a large tub of ice cream in the fridge (rum'n'raisin, if I recall correctly) which was rapidly starting to melt.

So The Bookseller and I began our day by eating half a litre of the stuff each, while sombrely humming AC/DC tunes. I have to say - although the portion was excessive, and the fact that we were eating it under duress may have taken some of the shine off it - I didn't find it at all inappropriate as a breakfast food.

Although by that time it was already mid-morning. And half an hour later, the pubs were open again....