Stand by at the end of January for that curious festival Farmhouse Breakfast Week, cooked up a few years ago by the Home Grown Cereals Authority to … er … do something.

Persuade us to eat like farmers? Repair to our nearest farmhouse for breakfast? No-one has ever really worked it out and, given that breakfast cereals have dominated the nation's breakfast tables for years anyway, why do we need the HGCA sticking its oar into our morning dietary habits?

And what, precisely, is a "farmhouse breakfast"? No-one has ever attempted to define the term. Do we imagine horny-handed sons of the soil helping themselves from chafing dishes of devilled kidneys, scrambled eggs and sausages?

In my experience, a farmhouse breakfast usually consists of a bit of cold bacon rolled into a chunk of white sliced, the outcome being the temporary assuagement of hunger and greasy fingermarks all over the vet's bill.

As to some of the recipe suggestions for the 2009 event, I can just imagine the reaction if a couple of farmers of my acquaintance came in from the milking in the sluicing rain and the wind arriving straight off the Urals to be confronted by a "wheaty raspberry smoothie" or a couple of "oat-topped baked tomatoes". And it wouldn't be printable, I can tell you.