WORKING breakfasts should be abolished but won't be because Americans love them.
They are a culinary and gastronomical abomination and prevent you having a decent breakfast with porridge and toast at home. Whether you get a lot of work done at these gobfests is doubtful as you try to write down intelligent notes in the middle of greasy plates, spilt coffee and ancient fruit recently released from a freezer.
The food, of course, is a minor concern and only an excuse to assemble a group that can be of use to the host to advance his/her career.
President Clinton would probably not have been reelected without the millions of dollars in "soft money" raised at innumerable breakfasts and coffee klatschs. He would put in brief appearances, squeeze hands and leave his aides to suggest how the guests could pay for the privilege.
The kind of working breakfast this correspondent attends are less glamorous but at least you are not tapped for $5,000 at the end. There are those that are free because someone wants to spread a message and is prepared to pay for your breakfast to get you to listen.
Then there are those where a group of foreign correspondents will pitch in to offer breakfast in an expensive downtown hotel to lure along an American politician or newsworthy figure who is otherwise difficult to get at.
The menu is always the same. Orange juice, very strong lukewarm coffee, tasteless melon, bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs and hash browns, muffins, croissants, bagels. Some people don't touch the food but I think that is discourteous and means you are staring at congealing bacon.
The breakfasts start punctually because the VIP whose words have to be recorded are busy people whose time is precious and, in the case of the President, expensive. In Ireland, where working breakfasts are making inroads, the etiquette is to stand around sipping orange juice or coffee for about half an hour because the PR people cunningly invite journalists too early to ensure enough are in place when the VIP arrives.
I once attended a working breakfast with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen John Shalikashvili, organised by USA Today. Washington morning traffic was bad as usual, parking was difficult as usual and I felt it was an achievement to enter the room just one minute after the appointed time to find the general launched into his spiel.
Well, if you command millions of soldiers you are entitled to punctuality at breakfast, parking or no parking. The problem then was do you make your late arrival worse by tiptoeing over to the table where breakfast was laid out and carry it back to your seat while the security of the world is being considered, or do you sit down immediately, forfeiting all food and drink as your penance for late arrival?
I did penance but made up for it afterwards as the general was whisked away to Bosnia, I think.
Usually, however, waiters are there to plonk down the food as you are scribbling. But how can you listen and write fast as the bacon and egg appears under your arm and competes for the space taken up by your notebook?
Most people stick tape recorders between their orange juice and coffee cups but on playback all you get is clink, clink, munch, munch, tummy rumbles and inaudible words from the VIP. How the VIPs get to eat breakfast is a bit of a mystery as they spend all the time talking but they have perfected the art of swallowing and talking at the same time.
Then there are the breakfasts where you must never report the VIP's words because this might change the world. This week, for example, I munched along with Strobe Talbott, the No 2 in the State Department, and now wrestling with how to expand NATO without Russia being provoked into a nuclear war.
He had to leave early because he was going to Pamela Harriman's funeral service in Washington Cathedral to be attended by President Clinton. This meant that even VIPs had to hang around for an hour before the service began.
Because of the delicacy of the negotiations with Russia, Mr Talbot did not want to speak on the record. He suggested on "background", which would mean attributing his words to a "US administration official". Then he said he could speak even more frankly if it was on "deep background", meaning attributed to nobody but yourself.
So you will never know what Strobe Talbot said at breakfast, or at least you will never know that he said it. But I can reveal on deep background that I finished scrambled eggs feeling the world was a safer place and that there is something to be said for working breakfasts after all.
You can also get your message across without making people eat. The Lord Mayor of Belfast, Dr Ian Adamson, was in town this week and he invited the press to what is known as a morning "Newsmaker" at the National Press Club, where no one mentions breakfast.
The Lord Mayor made history by beginning and ending his press conference in the Sioux Lakota language which he learned as a young doctor when he lived on a reservation in the Dakotas. Translated, it meant: "I can speak to you in Lakota but mainly I just speak English".
Thank you doctor for speaking English and not making me eat breakfast.