Eating breakfast

is done in two sessions in this house.
I am up before the Senior Cat. I set the table, collect the paper from the front lawn, eat and prowl briefly  through the paper in peace. 
The Senior Cat eventually surfaces and pads out to have his. 
It takes him a lot longer to eat his. He reads the paper rather more thoroughly and tends to stop eating as he reads it.
It used not to be this way.
Breakfast when I was a kitten tended to be chaotic. There were "grown ups" and four kittens who needed breakfast. We ate cereal and toast and drank milk. In one place we had milk flavoured with something called "Milo" - a chocolate sort of drink.  That was only allowed because the milk had to be made from milk powder. There was no fresh milk available. Everywhere else the milk, apart from our time in the city, had to be collected from the farm.
One of my earliest memories is sitting on the cross bar of the Senior Cat's bike and going to get the milk. The morning that remains clearest in my mind is the morning that we had to wait for the train to finish shunting before the Senior Cat could continue riding to the farm. It was a very cold morning, still dark and I can remember seeing the fuzzy drops of misty rain on my red mittens. They matched a red pixie hat I hated wearing because the strap which held the hat in place irritated my chin. I must have been about eighteen months old.
Why I was taken on these trips is something I will never know. The Senior Cat is puzzled too. "I suppose your mother didn't want you in the house while she was doing things."
She would have been pregnant with my brother by then so perhaps morning sickness was an issue.
It wasn't until my parents retired that breakfast became a slightly more relaxed affair - at least it was for the Senior Cat. He isn't one for lying in bed but, after years of getting up at five in the morning, he now tends to get up after seven. 
My mother could never do that. If I was up she would get up. She would complain about the fact I got up so early.
     "You don't need to get up," I would tell her again and again.
     "I can't lie there if I know you are up," she would tell me.
I tried being very quiet. It made no difference. 
Breakfasts were tense affairs. They were not the time for reading the paper or thinking about the day. Breakfast was a meal to get out of the way and then tackle the list of things that needed to be done - the list my mother had made.
    "Be thankful I am not like my mother,"  she would tell me. I was. Her mother was far worse but my mother was unable to recognise that  she was, in many ways, just like her mother. I just wanted to sit there and read the paper in peace. I wasn't ready for conversation.
I do read the paper in peace now. It never takes me that long. I leave it there neatly and tidily for the Senior Cat. He takes his time over the reading of it. 
And, if I do need to interrupt him, I apologise. But I try not to do that because breakfast is different now. 
The Senior Cat tells me we didn't talk much on those journeys to get the milk. 
We like quiet mornings.