DIFFERENT RULES FOR DIFFERENT times of day are symptoms of a subtle tyranny. Humans have always obeyed the sunlight, getting up and going to sleep with the light, but it’s the modern city of workplaces and—and, though it’s a subject for another time, public transport—that has forced us all under the oppressive rule of the clock. Up in the morning and out to school as the song goes, we’re creatures of punctuality, routine, and the habitual regimen of the time-of-day, more self-disciplined to the hour than Medieval monks ever were. Even the most notoriously time-bound workplaces of all, the watches of sailors on board ships in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, were enforced by relentless explicit violence and compulsory drug abuse. Like proper post-Foucauldians on board the Inner West Line train to work, we get the discipline without the fun.

I encourage you to work a proper rebellion into your diet, as I try to do to mine, as often as I can. Eat lunch whenever you please, once, twice, or however many times you get hungry. Red wine with fish, white wine with red meat. Forego dessert—it’s overrated. Eat dinner meals for breakfast. Eat breakfast meals for dinner.

Shakshuka

North African, according to the ‘Middle Eastern’ (according to its cataloguing) cookbook from which I plundered the recipe. I’m still not sure quite when Tunisia and Algeria and Morocco jumped out of Africa, and like the stub Eastern end of Egypt planted themselves onto Asia, but in the pages of cookbooks as in the clichés of newspapers they’re now conceptually just West of Gaza.

If the corner of a foreign field has USAF drones flying over it, I suspect, no matter where in the world it is, it counts as the Forever Middle East.

But I digress. Where was I? Take five tomatoes, tomato paste, two capsicums, four garlic cloves, a spoonful of cumin, and a big fat serve of harissa (see below). Simmer them until the sauce is thick and then poach eggs in it, then eat it with bread. It’s breakfast you can have, as I did, with a bottle of Coopers Extra Stout.

Harissa

OK I enjoyed this bit. Take a capsicum, char the skin on the barbecue, then leave it in a bowl with a plate on top until you can peel the blackened skin off. Fry up a Spanish onion with garlic, add coriander seeds, caraway seeds, cumin seeds, a bit of tomato paste, juice from half a lemon, salt, and as many de-seeded chillies as you can speculate tolerating: three, in my case, because I’m soft, but also because the chillies I bought are a bit too hot. Chuck them all in the food processor, to make a paste that smells like a sharp good-morning, and that you’d be well advised to wash your hands after touching.

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