Ten pairs of ready readers that you can never find scattered around the house, and the odd involuntary grunt when you tie your shoelaces tell you it's time to start looking after yourself.

First to go is the full Irish - replaced with kefir, raw oats, fruit and the like, whizzed up in the Nutri Ninja. Not quite the same.

And so a cooked breakfast with all the trimmings becomes a real treat, a repast to be taken with some anticipation on high days and holidays. But how much would you pay for a full Irish?

Specifically, what's a fair price, outside of a five-star hotel, for two poached eggs, rashers (two), sausages (two), black and white pudding (one of each), half a grilled tomato and two slices of toast?

I think a tenner would be stretching it but €14.50 and NOT including tea or coffee?

That's the price for "Bewley's Irish Breakfast" in Grafton Street - newly re-opened after a €12m redux that is fairly authentic to the original iconic cafe, although the red sticky carpet with fag-burn motifs has been jettisoned in favour of snowy white marble tiles.

The breakfast should also come, apparently, with "herbed mushrooms" but, mysteriously, they didn't make it on to my plate. Maybe I'm just not a fungi to be with.

A decent pot of Irish breakfast tea (loose leaf, hurrah!) at €3 brought the cost of breakfast up to €17.50.

At that price it should be truly exceptional. Sadly, it wasn't. The poached eggs, though perfectly cooked, were cool to the point of annoyance. Most restaurants pre-cook poached eggs, plunge them into iced water and then reheat in near boiling water when the order comes in to bring them back up to temperature before they become overcooked.

Something went wrong. The sausages were also under-heated

I grumbled to the waiter in the usual apologetic, halfhearted Irish way just so he could tell the cooks to cop on, but a supervisor appeared in short order to offer me an apology and a little something off the bill which I declined.

After all, I had eaten most of it and most of it was good, though not €17.50 good. And Bewley's was a good place to be on the morning of December 8.

The tradition of a trip up to Dublin on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception endures and there was a lovely hubbub as tables of women displayed that remarkable feminine gift of keeping three separate conversations going at the same time without missing a beat.

And there was laughter and pre-Christmas cheer and warmth on a cold winter morning.

Looking around, most were simply taking an Americano or Latte ( €3.50) and a sticky bun (€3.30) while taking selfies in the place they hadn't seen since college days.

There were no major novelists canoodling with doe-eyed ingenues in the red velvet booths and an impossibly sexy Phil Lynott wasn't lounging in the mezzanine, God rest his soul.

But Bewley's is a buzzy blast from the past and Grafton Street is all the better for its return.

By the time I left around 11.20am, there was a queue of 40 people waiting to be seated.

Sunday Independent