Breakfast. Some have it, some don’t. But whatever it is we do have, the likelihood is that it was the same this morning as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow.

Yes, researchers from the Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands have revealed – via studies in the US and France – that breakfast is officially the dullest, most unchanging meal of the day. 

Or, as they put it: “Both endogenously and exogenously induced variation in hedonic goal activation modulates variety seeking in meals across days.”

And, as I feel I was put on this planet to translate gobbledygook, I can tell you that what they are getting at is that few of us are that hedonic at breakfast, keeping our hedonism under wraps until – at least – lunchtime at which time the variety and spice of life can be unleashed. 

Breakfast is mere function, a means to ends. Many of us get through it while barely awake, automatons sipping and troughing in the hope that the day will improve as each minute passes. Indeed, as that very survey puts it: “People exhibit a circadian rhythm in the variety of foods they eat.” The circadian rhythms regulate us, they are our internal body clock, running in the background. They have a simple message in the morning: toast, coffee. 

And thank God for these chronobiological processes, because at this time of year when it’s dark and damp outside and Nick Robinson is bullying Government ministers in the background on the Today programme, without them I’m not sure many of us would make it until elevenses, let alone lunch.

So we breakfast on auto-pilot. Parents with small children endeavour to get enough into the faces of their little ones so they have enough sustenance to get to school and make it until snack time. Grown-ups attempt to come round with coffee and, bleary-eyed, can just about muscle up toast. And thus it is, day in day out, until the weekend or we manage to go away. 

You know you can do better than this, you know you should. You know variety is good for the body and mind but it often feels that life is stressful enough without having to make time to plan to revolutionise your breakfast; which sounds like some claptrap article you see heralded in some ghastly magazine on a newsstand at the station that you’re not going to waste money on buying.