29 August 2010

The cream of cricket: What a mess at Lord's


Sooner or later, every pannier I have ends up smelling of sour milk.

Because sooner or later, despite the lessons of history, I'm tempted to transport a pot of cream. And sooner or later, trapped under something heavy - a bottle of water, say, or a folder full of job rejections - said container explodes, transforming the pannier in a white-out instant into a milky Chernobyl. Ortlieb becomes Prypiat.

My lactose-emulsive cataclysm came yesterday, cycling to see the final England-Pakistan test at Lord's. (No cycle parking at all, but some handy hire-bike docking stations.)

Possibly under the weight of my picnic lunch, possibly following an over-enthusiastic baggage search, the tub of Tesco's double lavishly self-destructed.

'Suitable for pouring, whipping and cooking', it says on the tub. It should add 'unsuitable for carting around in over-stuffed bike panniers'.

I spent the first hour of play mopping up fugitive lagoons of cream from me, from the concrete floor, from fellow spectators. It was like a bomb in a Dulux factory, a new shade in the Exxon Valdez range, snowdrift with a hint of stale Camembert.

I flushed out the pannier in the gents with an OCD rigour but it still reeks, inevitably, of baby sick.

What a terrible, sad, needless, sticky mess; a mess that can never be properly cleaned up; a day that will be grimly remembered by all those involved. And that's just Pakistan's batting.

Remember, when transporting hazardous foodstuffs by bicycle, there is a line you shouldn't cross, a mark you shouldn't overstep. Same goes for Pakistan's bowling.

5 comments:

  1. I can feel your pain. You need a trailer!

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  2. What you need is a Lock'n'lock container to put it in (avoid all imitations)

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  3. You just need to break this absurd cream habit! After all, it's downhill going home from Lords, so you don't need it as fuel.

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  4. A couple of weeks ago I sideswiped a parked car with one of my panniers on the way back from Tesco (this is why I don't drive a car). One of the six eggs I bought cracked and slowly dripped down over everything in my pannier.

    This gave me a good excuse to clear out the winter's detritus out of my pannier, as I mopped egg white (who knew each egg contains a gallon of white?) off of gloves, bungee cords, broccoli and fluorescent yellow rain trousers. Sigh.

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  5. That's very witty. I enjoyed that :0)
    Rode one of ypou Quirkies a couple of weeks ago. I enjoyed that too.

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