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.

The problem with lunchtime is that people have different ideas of when it takes place. To me, lunch has always been 1pm. I think that stems from my first office job having a fixed 1pm to 2pm lunch break. Or, at least I thought it was fixed, in reality everyone had lunch had some point between noon and 2pm and it was entirely flexible, it was just the employment contract that was not.

Even with this flexibility I still had a colleague who thought lunch was at a different time entirely. He would have lunch around 11am. But, because he didn’t want to leave the office and make it look like he was skiving early, nor did he want to eat at his desk, he would often be found eating a sandwich in the men’s toilet.

“Early lunch or late breakfast?”, I’d ask.

“Both,” he would say, using the sandwich in his hand to point to the empty (and just finished) cereal bowl and single serve packet of corn flakes beside him on the bathroom sink.

I always thought that was the strangest lunch/breakfast I’d ever seen until, last week, I discovered one of my colleagues has an even stranger habit. They have breakfast cocktails, which is not as alcoholic as it might first appear.

A breakfast cocktail is when you get a cereal bowl and then fill it first with one cereal, let’s say Rice Krispies, and then you take that bowl and… fill it again with a second entirely different cereal, let’s say Just Start. Then you mix the two together and have them both for breakfast. What freak does that?!

I thought of both of my colleagues today as, through the fact that no one knows the right time for lunch, I had people book meetings at 1130, noon, 1pm and 2pm, completely covering three hours over lunch. So, to eat, I’ve bought a sandwich from Sainsbury’s and I may need to say at some point: “Excuse me, a minute, I’m just going to pop to the toilet.”

Bread: Tuk-IN Kashmiri Chili Chicken in an naan (very nice!)

Ingredient: See above

Taste: convenient