For the last three years I’ve used January to try and learn something new. Three years ago it was to try 31 days of exercise, two years ago it was 31 days of stretching, last year it was 31 days of learning to play the piano and this year it’s 31 days of… lunch.

I really wanted a bagel for lunch and that meant I really wanted turkey for lunch. For some reason, I associate bagels with turkey. Not cream cheese and salmon. I’ve never understood that one. The cream cheese squirts out as soon as you press down.

“That’s because you eat it open!” You scream at me.

“But then it wouldn’t be a sandwich!” I retort.

And you accept I’m right because I’m the one writing the argument so I’m not going to make myself lose, am I?

Anyway, I am right. You need a bottom and you need a top. Without one, you have what is called an ‘open sandwich’ and open sandwich is a sandwich with a bit missing. It’s half a sandwich. Just a sand. And no one eats sand.

I admit my views on open sandwich may be born out of bitter experience. I bought a sandwich in London and chose to sit in rather than take it away. They brought it to my table. It had no top.

“There’s a bit missing,” I said.

There was a pause. Then they explained with only a large amount of patronising expressions that this was what I ordered. A sandwich, open to the world.

All I could think was “If this was £7 [it was London!] how much to get an actual sandwich!”

That’s why I don’t eat open bagels. When it’s cold I like a bagel, toasted, and I like to add turkey and cheese to it. Never chicken, never ham. Always turkey and I don’t know why.

Until writing this entry I would never have thought about it. It’s become a reflex action. Buy bagel, buy sliced turkey. Maybe it goes back to my childhood? Maybe my mum only ate turkey bagels when I was in the womb?

But given my mum thinks that anything other than traditional plain Scottish bread is exotic I can rule out this explanation as she’s never eaten a bagel in her life. I may not have either. I used to think bagels had the texture of a tyre rim, looked like a tyre rim and could, in a flat tyre emergency, be used as a tyre rim.

But a local baker started making them and I bought one as it didn’t look like moped wheels and, wow, bagels can also be used for eating and not dirt biking.

At the same time I must have had some turkey and added that to the bagel and a link was created in my head. Bagel, bad. Bagel and turkey, good.

Whatever the reason today I had a bagel with turkey and cheese.

Bread: bagel

Ingredient: mature cheddar and sliced turkey.

Taste: like a complete sandwich