Jamaican breakfast

I am eating one of the best breakfasts. It became a family favourite years ago when we stumbled into Bradford very early one morning. Cornmeal porridge & banana. It's great! Fine cornmeal or polenta cooked up with milk and mashed banana added in. We discovered it at a Jamaican cafe that was next to an afro-carribbean hairdressers.

First husband was a black man, so our boys are beautiful brown people. We split up and then my ex died. To cut out a long story, the boys then grew up with little to no black culture in their lives. We would try, but really in this part of Scotland, there is very little in the way of Afro-Carribbean or Afro-American culture.

One day a few years ago Sean, my middle boy who has beautiful curls, expressed an interest in having dreadlocks put in his hair. I didn't know the first thing about how to go about this and neither did any barbers near us. We also checked to see if we could find a black hairdresser in Glasgow or Edinburgh and we couldn't find one there either. We decided to look south to the Bradford/Leeds area, well known for its Asian and Caribbean communities and it was there that we found somebody who could help us.

I have forgotten the name of this hairdresser in Bradford, but she had a woman in her shop who specialized in dreadlocks. The dread specialist only worked on Wednesdays. Hmm. We explained our situation. Our poor mixed race child stuck up in the north where white meets bread and nobody to help him with his desire for dreads. She arranged for a special appointment on a Saturday morning for Sean.

So, very very early on a Saturday morning, the family piled in the car and drove the three hours south to Bradford and this very accommodating hairdresser. We had to be there just as she opened as what Sean wanted done took hours to complete.

We got to Bradford just before nine and got Sean handed over to these beautiful, loud and vivacious Jamaican women. Trouble was, what do WE do for all this time. We're very far from home. We've never been to Bradford before and despite the plan to have a curry in Bradford's famous curry mile before we drive back, we were at a bit of a loose end.

As nobody had eaten breakfast yet, we decided that was the first thing to do. Luckily there was a cafe one or two doors down from the hairdressers. A small and unassuming place, this cafe seemed to be the centre of this Jamaican community that we had blundered into.

It was still very early and the cafe was still waking up, but there was steam on the windows and great smells rolling from the kitchen. We all ordered cornmeal porridge with banana and mugs of strong tea. This cornmeal and banana porridge leapt into one of the top breakfasts of all time. The beauty of it was that it was simple and I could make it at home!

Sean kept those dreadlocks for over a year. He really looked striking. He shaved them off when he tired of them but from time to time, we will still have, like this morning, cornmeal and banana for breakfast.