The first leg of our trip to Mauritius was the short hop from Edinburgh to Heathrow. It was breakfast time and that means only one thing. A BA breakfast.

Fifteen years ago the BA Shuttle Brekkie would take up the whole of your tray table, and take the majority of the hour long flight to eat.

In those long forgotten days before Low Cost airlines, BA and BMI used to try and “out breakfast” each other so much to win profitable businesstravellers fares that the BA full English was sheer indulgence for those of us with red eyes at 6am going to London.

You got a carton of cornflakes. A cuplet of milk to pour over those corn flakes. A larger cuplet of orange juice. A warm roll with butter.  Jam and marmalade in separate glass pots. The warm tray had scrambled eggs, or omelete, bacon, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes and hash browns.

The crew would manage two coffee rounds and open the bar for anyone looking for the dutch courage red wine provides before a business meeting. There was a refreshing towel and most essentially a toothpick to get rid of the remnants of the bacon.

Nowadays the British Airways breakfast is a pale imitation of its former glory. Tiny sausage, waifer thin bacon, and tomatoes replaced by splash of ketchup. It is a breakfast for the sake of being able to say the breakfast exists rather than providing gastronomic excitement. The low costs and the recession have stripped the BA brekkie of any relevance except one.

It still provides something to do – a routine.

Open the orange carton and drink. Take the roll out of its wrapper, eat and put the wrapper in the empty orange carton. Eat the hot stuff. It gives you something to take your mind off the fact that you are up at stupid o’clock.

But at 6am the BA breakfast, although vastly reduced (Now the toothpick and the towel are long gone thus diminishing the routine and the excision of unwanted meat) still provides a useful service.

A distraction from the tedium of short haul air travel.

To be continued…..