Colm O'Regan: Porridge is an essential part of my morning smugness routine

Porridge didn’t try to win me over with plastic-free gifts like Kelloggs did.

I blame Kidnapped. Sometimes a book can put you off a food. Kidnapped is one of the books Robert Luis Stevenson wrote that isn’t Treasure Island. And in the first few chapters of the book, a lot of porridge is eaten. 

Not the splash of fruit compote, pat-your-slim-tummy, nudge your sexy partner playfully, dash for the train, go to work at a Hedge Fund, joyful healthy porridge of advertising campaigns. 

No this was grim, dour 18th century Scottish parritch. Warm parritch in the morning, cold parritch for lunch and more parritch for dinner washed down by ale (which sounded like Smithwicks and porridge).

It probably did for porridge what the fairytale Cinderella did for lentils.

If you remember, her stepmother made it impossible for Cinderella to get to the ball by forcing her to take lentils out of the ashes first, knowing she wouldn’t be able to do it. (You’ll see a similar trick being played if you are trying to apply for a grant). The whole effect was to make lentils appear cruel.

So, Cinderella is an unlikely scapegoat for climate change but I’m sure I’d have reduced my meat intake a lot earlier if my finger had been on the pulses a bit more. It wasn’t just Robert Luis Stevenson though. I didn’t have an easy relationship with porridge. I was afraid of it at one stage as a nervous child. 

One of my earliest memories is sitting at the table, not wanting to eat it, and heaping sugar onto a rapidly cooling bowl of porridge watching it caramelise and turn a series of sitting-room carpet colours, becoming more and more inedible.

And porridge didn’t try to win me over with plastic-free gifts like Kelloggs did. Anything you got with it required far more perseverance than the ‘on demand’ Kelloggs box.  If Kelloggs were giving something away with their sugared salty flakes, it was in the box.

Gratification was instant. Flahavan’s Progress Oatlets gave things away very slowly. We just about managed as a family to eat enough to get some playing cards.

Often the offer expired before we could get the tokens in. I imagined our envelope of tokens being opened at Flahavan HQ by an old man sweeping the floor of an empty office who said to himself. “Bath-towels? There hasn’t been a free bath towels offer in these here parts for the last twenty years”. 

Who could have consumed enough oats in time to get a nice free gift? Perhaps a team of draught-horses - but what were they going to do with a set of three saucepans.

But now, I’m a grownup and one of the hallmarks of grownuposity is to eat food that scared you before. Mad stuff like tomatoes and non-mushy peas. And porridge. It’s an essential part of my morning smugness routine. 

No matter what happens by mid-morning, I can pat my belly and say I might be a weak and flawed and self-absorbed human being but at least the sugars are being absorbed slowly into my bloodstream.

Even the packaging feels lean. Oats and a bit of plasticky paper. There has been a move towards nonsense package in recent years. Porridge arriving in a giant Pringles tube or packaged in brightly coloured individual sachets.

What the hell is wrong with us that we need our packaging to be so friendly? We’re not children. Eat your parritch, dammit.

But, I digress. Porridge is the business. Oats grown here. Milled here. A squillion calories of tasty goodness. Apparently, if you give it to cattle they release less methane. (But you don’t have to make them porridge.)

So this is just a token of my esteem.