Being a "morning" rather than

a "night" person I have always eaten breakfast. Breakfast is an essential part of my day. If I only ate one meal a day I would want it in the morning.
I do not eat a lot of breakfast, certainly I do not stand there and cook myself bacon and eggs. As far as I know I have never had bacon and eggs for breakfast. Cooked breakfasts do not appear on the menu in our household - unless porridge in winter counts as "cooked".
Other people's breakfast habits puzzle me. My father is fine. He has exactly the same thing every morning....he counts out five heaped spoons of home-made muesli and adds cold milk. He then gets distracted by something in the paper for a bit. When he has read that. He will pour milk into his coffee mug and then put the mug in the microwave ready to warm. He will cut one slice of bread ready to toast. Sometimes he gets distracted by the next piece of essential reading and these things will remain half done until he has finished the article in question. He eats cereal in an absent fashion reading all the while. He toasts bread and heats milk in the same way. Toast and milk can grow quite cold if there is something else that interests him - but he still needs to eat breakfast.
There are other people I know who feel quite differently about breakfast. I know people who never eat breakfast. Others drink coffee. On the rare occasions I venture into the CBD before 9 am I am always amazed by the people who queue at the doughnut counter for ersatz coffee. Some of them are so regular they do not even need to speak. They just hand over their money and get their so-called coffee. (I am reliably informed that it tastes of cardboard.) A few eat doughnuts as well.
There are local people who wander up to the shopping centre each morning and get their coffee there. They are also so regular the staff know them. One local man has trained them into providing him with a double strength coffee in his own insulated mug. If the weather is fine he then wanders slowly home talking to people on the way. If it it is too hot or wet he will sit there and read the paper the cafe provides or talk to people who appear. Other people do the same. For them breakfast (or at least coffee) is just an excuse to get them out of the house for a bit. They are not necessarily lonely. It just part of their daily ritual.
But all this is not "having breakfast" in my view. I can miss lunch if I really must, although it will leave me with a headache later in the afternoon. I can miss dinner in the evening.
I saw one of the local GPs in the supermarket yesterday. He was standing there staring at the cereal boxes. "Cat do you know what....is?" I showed him the packets of breakfast cereal in question. It is one of the more sensible choices, suitable for the household of a doctor. He took one gingerly.
"I suppose people do eat this stuff," he said vaguely.
"Well yes, what do you eat for breakfast?"
"Oh I don't eat breakfast. I just get coffee when I get to work," he tells me.
Right. He is a doctor. He does not eat breakfast. Maybe there is something wrong with me. Should I make an appointment as a matter of urgency?