It’s morning and I’m looking through the cupboard in the kitchen, where we keep the breakfast cereal.
Plain corn flakes.
Plain multigrain hoops.
Plain Rice Krispies.
Plain Weetabix.
Quakers Oat Cereal (ugh).
Quakers Oat Muesli with Seeds and Nuts (double ugh).
Where the HELL are the chocolate Crispy Minis? Or the Crunchy Nut Clusters? Or even the Frosties, for Christ’s sake?!
Lizzie is watching me with an amused smirk.
‘Buzzzzzz, buzzzzzz, buzzzzzz,’ she suddenly starts buzzing. ‘Busy little bee! Looking for sugar! Buzzzzz, buzzzzzz…’
A sweat breaks out on my forehead. What else have we got in here? Ready Brek? What’s the use of Ready Brek?
Every morning, I feel the same way. Zombie-like and barely functioning. Like a husk (a human-sized Farley’s Rusk husk, you might say). Until I get that first sugar hit. It can’t be in my coffee. It has to be in my food.
Quite often, when I get up in the morning, I go down to the kitchen and immediately freebase chocolate. In other words, I open up a great big slab of a bar and immediately ingest some chunks of the stuff. The effect is instantaneous. I can immediately feel the delicious sugar ‘hit’ coursing through my veins.
But, this morning, there’s no chocolate in the cupboard. Only these drab, awful cereals.
‘Where’s the good stuff?’ I say to Lizzie desperately, like the true addict I am. ‘Where’s the Honey Nut Crunch?’ At least there must be some of that somewhere.
‘Buzzzzzz, buzzzzzz, buzzzzzz,’ Lizzie continues. ‘Hungry little bee!’
‘For God’s sake, stop it!’ I cry. ‘I NEED sugar! I… I… need… it…’ The last few words are gasped and pathetic… like the garbled final cry of a character from Trainspotting.
‘You know, it was sugary cereal which gave me cancer,’ says Lizzie, piously. ‘That’s why we need to stop getting it. It’s not good for us!’
‘YOU DON’T KNOW THAT!’ I retaliate vehemently, with the panicked fury of a patient who’s about to have their daily morphine dosage dropped. ‘It could have been ANYTHING which caused your cancer! Sugary cereal probably had nothing to do with it!’
Lizzie shrugs.
It’s now I find… in another cupboard… a packet of granulated sugar. It’s not the holier-than-thou brown stuff. It’s the good stuff… white like the purest cocaine.
I tear the top open of the granulated sugar packet, then slather it over a bowl of cornflakes.
I tuck into my bowl of sugary cornflakes (as Lizzie looks on, disgusted), with an expression of joy and enormous relief.
‘Mmm… mnnn… eating this stuff might be life-threatening,’ I say, as I munch away happily, ‘but sometimes you’ve just got to stand up for what you want.’ I waggle my spoon authoritatively at Lizzie, as I say these last words, like a US general waggling his cigar at a lowly grunt.
‘And, to be honest, if one day I’m going to die on any hill,’ I soldier on, ‘I’ll be happy if it’s a hill of sugary cornflakes.’
Lizzie doesn’t answer. I mean… what is there for her to say?
So I continue the conversation by myself.
‘Mmm… mnnn… mmmmnnnnnn…’
P. D. Clifton 
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