Getting my oats

I was attacked by a bowl of porridge this morning would you believe. It was all my arse's fault.

Now don't get me wrong. I like porridge. Nowadays anyway. For years I actually loathed it as a lumpy, curdled gloop that only my grandad could possibly like, and at that, only because still-near memories of the famine made him eat all sorts of foul shite and exhort us young 'uns to stop moaning and get that stirabout down our necks. Nah. Industrial-sized pots of thick pasty porridge bubbling on our stove didn't so much make me hanker for a bowl of goodness as start me wondering why my mother was boiling a colony of lepers for breakfast.

Alas, my whining, refusals and arguments about corn flakes fell on deaf ears. I was made eat it, and so childhood school mornings were a daily endurance test as I gagged my way through to the bottom of the bowl.

The ad on TV and radio used to bring me out in a cold sweat. Some posh perfect mumsy type chirping cheerfully: "Start the day the Flahavan's way, the natural way to start the day, a fibre fit way to start the day on a cold and frosty morning." Pah, stick it up your hole Mrs. Von Trapp.

All that I had to endure did afford me a sort of kudos at school however, where classmates were amazed that both force-feeding and Dickensian poorhouse breakfasts were still features of modern Ireland. They didn't think I was hard or anything, just stoic and deserving of respect for bearing uncool parents with such quiet dignity.

As soon as I was old enough, myself and porridge parted ways for a long time. I got in with all sorts of cheerios, cocoa pops, Kellogg's Start and other flaky characters. But then, after years in the wilderness I decided I wanted to be fit and healthy, took up going to the gym and started hearing all sorts of wonderful things about porridge. Carbs. Lean protein. GI rating. Wow. It seemed the old pot of stodge was making a come back. It was cool to eat porridge!

I've been eating it for quite some time now. I make it myself so it's never lumpy, add lots of milk so it's never thick and a spoonful of honey sweetens the medicine and helps it all go down and quite why this sentence involves Mary Poppins imagery I'm not sure.

Anyway, before I forget the reason for this post, me and the porridge were getting along just fine until I sat down beside a steaming bowl of it this morning without realising that the lip of the place mat it was resting on was poking over the side of the table. My arse snagged it on the way past as I sat. The place mat flipped. The bowl went flying. And there was my porridge like road kill all over the carpet and all over me.

The next few things I said had alot of asterisks in.

Then I stood up and as my breakfast oozed down my legs to the floor like grey lava, I wondered was this payback for all the nasty things I said about it in the past. Or maybe my arse is still too big.