On the weekend ritual that has become the closest thing this city has to a shared faith

I have come to believe that brunch is the closest thing modern London has to a religion, and the evidence is everywhere, in the queues that form outside the favored establishments, in the devotion with which the ritual is observed, in the way an entire city organizes its weekends around the consumption of eggs at a time that is neither breakfast nor lunch. I, Lowri Griffiths, have stood in these queues, have observed this devotion, and I am prepared to argue that brunch has quietly become London’s shared faith.

The Weekly Pilgrimage

Every Saturday and Sunday morning, across this city, Londoners rise, dress with more care than the occasion strictly requires, and set out on a pilgrimage to the establishments where brunch is served. They do not call in advance, because the favored places do not take bookings, and so they queue, sometimes for an hour or more, standing patiently outside in the British weather for the privilege of eventually being seated and served the eggs they could have made at home in ten minutes. The queue is not a deterrent. The queue is part of the ritual.

I have stood in these queues, and I have observed that no one in them appears to resent the wait, that everyone accepts it as the natural and proper cost of the experience, the way a pilgrim accepts the hardship of the journey as part of the devotion. The queue confers value. The brunch you waited an hour for is, by some alchemy of human psychology, more satisfying than the identical brunch you could have walked straight into, because the waiting is part of what you came for, the small suffering that sanctifies the reward.

The economics of all this are, when examined, faintly absurd, with London’s eating-out culture documented by everyone from food critics to the lifestyle pages of Time Out London, and the prices reaching levels that would have astonished previous generations, who regarded eggs as a thing you had at home. But the brunch-goer does not go for the value, any more than the worshipper attends the service for the architecture. They go for the ritual, the gathering, the shared observance, and the eggs, expensive as they are, are merely the sacrament.

The Theology of the Avocado

Every religion has its sacred objects, and London brunch has the avocado, elevated from a humble fruit to a symbol of an entire way of life, mashed onto toast and photographed with a reverence that borders on the devotional. The avocado has become so central to the brunch liturgy that it now functions almost as a creed, a way of signaling one’s membership in the congregation, one’s participation in the shared faith. To order the avocado is to affirm the belief.

The avocado has also become, somewhat unfairly, a symbol of a whole set of anxieties about my generation and our spending, the object lesson trotted out by every commentator who wishes to suggest that we cannot afford homes because we spend our money on brunch. This is, of course, nonsense, the housing crisis having causes considerably larger than my egg consumption, but the avocado endures as a symbol, the sacred object that has somehow also become a target, venerated and blamed in equal measure.

I confess that I participate fully in the avocado liturgy, that I have ordered it more times than I can count, that I have photographed it, that I have, on occasion, felt the small swell of belonging that comes from participating in a shared ritual observed by millions. The avocado is silly. The devotion to it is sillier. And yet there is something genuinely comforting in the shared observance, in being part of something larger than oneself, even if that something is a fruit on toast.

The Faith That Fills the Gap

What brunch really provides, I have come to think, is the thing that organized religion once provided and that secular London largely lacks: a shared weekly ritual, a gathering, a reason to come together with others in observance of something. We have lost the church, for the most part, but the human need it answered, the need for ritual and gathering and shared observance, did not vanish with it, and brunch has quietly risen to fill the gap. It is where we gather now, on our weekend mornings, to be among others in shared devotion.

This is why the queues do not deter us, why the prices do not stop us, why the whole faintly absurd ritual persists and grows. We are not really there for the eggs. We are there for the gathering, the company, the sense of participating in something shared, the small comfort of doing what countless others are doing at the same moment across the city. Brunch is communion, in the most literal sense, a coming-together over food, and the eggs are merely the occasion.

So I will continue to queue, and to order the avocado, and to participate in London’s great secular faith, and to write about it over at my home on The London Prat, because the rituals we invent to replace the ones we have lost are worth paying attention to, even when those rituals involve standing outside for an hour to pay too much for eggs.

If you too have queued for brunch and wondered, somewhere around the forty-minute mark, what exactly you are doing with your one precious life, know that you are participating in something larger than yourself, even if that something is brunch. More dispatches from London’s secular faith appear at The London Prat, and Time Out London will tell you where the current congregations are gathering, and how long the queues are likely to be.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/