Intercontinental Breakfast

6.30am, the Ibis Gangnam, Seoul: showered, shaved and suited, Korean businessmen arrive for breakfast.

Shortly after dawn in business hotels the world over, the same tragedy is performed. Actors emerge from the intermission and file unthinkingly down to the theatre. They gather their props, the interchangeable components of the continental breakfast, and take position upon the stage. The script takes no remembering; it has no words.

I am an outsider, and not because of my race. (A couple of gaijin join in the ritual cremation of bread and picking up of croissants with tongs). No, I am an interloper; I've wandered through the wrong stage door. I sit quietly in a corner with my bran flakes, toast, sweetened orange juice and appalling coffee, hoping I'm not spotted.

The worlds we inhabit are so close to one another, they're capable of these brief, awkward overlaps. Breakfast over, we withdraw back to our own dressing rooms, continents apart, and the only thing we really share is the insatiated hunger that dogs our mornings.