Ha-ha. Your comment reminds me of the most cheffy Lord’s picnic I ever enjoyed, which was in the very capable hands of the late, great Alastair “Big Al de Large” Little:

https://ianlouisharris.com/2017/07/09/three-days-at-the-lords-test-england-v-south-africa-6-7-9-july-2017/

Cheffy, yet all cleverly designed to be easy to eat as a picnic.

Strongly against sullying those cheeses with jam.

The King Cricket (runny-cheese-commentary-lite) report from 2019:

https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/what-does-it-take-to-make-a-lords-test-match-quintessentially-irish-a-match-report/2019/11/27/

Runny cheese on a picnic? Has climate change awareness entirely passed you by, Miriam? The English summer is now just one long heatwave.

I did cover the topic of runny cheeses at blisteringly hot test matches quire comprehensively in my own report on the 2019 Ireland test match at Lord’s:

https://ianlouisharris.com/2019/07/26/the-week-that-ireland-came-to-lords-23-to-26-july-2019/

The runny cheese details were absent from my King Cricket report on that match.

I do hope that answers your question, Miriam. It’s great to see you commenting here again.

No problem for me there Ged. Cricket, with its history of around 500 years or so, has only a minor hold on tradition. But eating – that goes back further, about 540 million years. And in all that time, nothing whatsoever has changed.

Essentially, two cnidarians by the names of Cam and Brian (after whom that period is named), sat down one balmy evening for a chat. Brian became hungry, although he didn’t know what hungry meant. Nor did he know how hungry felt, or indeed, anything at all. Despite this, he decided to rustle up a tasty meal of oatmeal and animal fat. Not having any oatmeal (on account of being under the sea) nor animal fat (on account of him and Cam being the only animals), he instead dreamed up a fricassee of plankton in a white wine sauce. This (without the white wine sauce and the fricasseeing) became his and Cam’s staple diet for the next 539,999,500 years. But he never forgot that initial desire for oatmeal and animal fat, so as soon as this became more available, he moved to make it a fact. Sadly, Cam had died only 539 million years earlier. In memory of his lost friend, he decreed that this meal “wille onley bee cock-ed inn that playse wher wonn is at hoam” (*).

And thus was the tradition on only cooking throdkin in your own kitchen born. Don’t mess with it.

(*) The spelling is due to Brian’s overall lack of hands.

I think I kept the toothbrush in the kitchen because there was nowhere sensible to stand it in the bathroom, but in truth I don’t really remember.

If anyone is temporally confused by this match report, it relates to the England v India Edgbaston test match in 2022. Sam’s report on the 2023 Edgbaston test was published on King Cricket last week – my report on same (now including a link to Sam’s piece) can be found here.

https://ianlouisharris.com/2023/06/17/the-heavy-rollers-do-the-ashes-test-at-edgbaston-15-to-17-june-2023/

I wouldn’t risk making throdkin cookies in a kitchen other than my own, JB. Indeed, now that I am “a gentleman of a certain age” it would probably be the wrong end of the risk/reward equation for me to eat such stuff. Bert might have a different view on whether caution free, fearless picnic making should include executing the throdkin cookie or not. But no-one wants to get to 60 or so and then hole-out with a silly shot when playing the longer form of the game.