If Full English breakfasts are your friend, here’s your ideal recipe.

At least according to a recent survey by YouGov, those famous exemplars of credibility, the perfect supplements to bacon are as follows: sausage (82 per cent approved), toast (73 per cent), beans (71 per cent), fried egg (65 per cent) and hash brown (60 per cent).

Now, I’m not one to take issue with the masses (actually I am, look what they did to America), but something here doesn’t seem quite right. If my time at Cambridge has taught me anything, it’s the priceless quality of a hash brown in the Buttery.

Oh, the glorious hash brown. That potato-y, onion-y, deep-fried-crisp-outer, fluffily-seasoned-inner, golden-brown hub of all things delicious. If it weren’t for the hash brown, I would have forsaken myself to a world without sunshine. If it weren’t for that savoury crunch of carbohydrate, I would’ve thrown myself out of the UL tower out of sheer exasperation for a world devoid of anything good.

If it weren’t for that rounded triangle of pure, unadulterated joy, I would have no reason to leave the stinking pit I call my room. I dream of hash browns. I breathe hash browns. My heart beats hash-brown blood through my hash-brown body.  My first child will be called Hash Brown. (Hash for short, HB if you’re on really good terms.)

To summarise, hash browns are love, hash browns are life.

So to me it seems frankly a travesty – if not a war crime – that hash browns only have a 60 per cent approval rating for their presence in a cooked breakfast. Are you having a laugh? Is this some sick joke, some dystopian world I’ve found myself in? (Well, maybe…)

Hash browns define a brunch. Their presence can elevate a measly sausage and bean combo to godly heights. They provide the support and comfort that Cambridge students can only dream of getting from their supervisors. They are life-affirming. They mop the bean juice from the plate, the tears from your sleep-deprived eyes, and the sweat from your work-beaten brow.

Give me a breakfast devoid of bacon and I won’t kick off. No toast? Still okay. If it’s lacking beans I may weep momentarily, but I’m not going to bawl. Tomato, egg and mushrooms I have no time for anyway. But no hash browns? Unacceptable. Disrespectful. Foul. A mockery of everything I stand for. Fake news. A plate lacking their celestial presence may well warrant a temper tantrum unrivalled by even the grumpiest of toddlers.

“My first child will be called Hash Brown. (Hash for short, HB if you’re on really good terms)”

Stingily serve me just one hash brown and I’ll perceive it as a personal sleight. You might see me being dragged from the Buttery spitting and snarling, invoking the wrath of my ancestors and cursing your family’s women to forever birth deformed potatoes.

And you know what? I don’t even think this is unjustified. Hash browns are important and I will defend them with every ounce of my nine-stone-something (maybe slightly more from the amount of hash browns I actually eat, but whatever) frame. Come between me and my carby lover and I’ll separate you from your entrails.

Dishing the dirt on clean eating

I could give you a detailed floor plan of access to hash browns in each college, and will gladly guide you to the best hash brown hideouts. (St Catz for their mini hash brown bites which, with their high surface-area-to-volume ratio, provide an obscenity-inducing, epiphanic experience.)  I just really, really, REALLY love them.

So, to the silent 40 per cent of humans (if I can bring myself to call them that) who believe that hash browns have no place on a breakfast plate: HASH me ousside, how BROWN dat