Eating at Lord's

The first day of the Black Caps vs England test match was exciting but a bit woeful. Plenty of wickets is a bonus, though you hope it’s the team you support getting them. Lord’s is a magic place. Sure, some of the old English supporters are a bit pompous (we encountered one who was unimpressed by a fellow Englishman’s constant use of the word fuck), but there’s something quite charming about people dressing up for the day, the constant hum of chatter from the crowd, the older members of it reading newspapers in the breaks. It was a day with a bit of rain, but what is an English Summer without that?

What I particularly loved was how much of an unexpected culinary delight the day was.

Lord’s is apparently the only ground in the world where you’re allowed to take in one bottle of wine (or some beers) per person when a test match is on. The sound of popping, and sight of flying, corks was an endless source of joy. I regretted only taking Rosé and Gavi. That has since been rectified: there’s a bottle of champagne in the fridge to take to the third day of the test tomorrow. I was also quite impressed by the number of people who brought proper wine glasses and champagne flutes to drink from. I felt decidedly bogan with my plastic tumblers.

Just on the matter of wine, I decanted our bottle of Rosé into a thermos flask shortly after arriving at the ground to keep it cool. The blokes sitting next to us - from Devon and Cornwall - remarked that the drink from my thermos didn’t look like English tea. A trick for young players: English security will always assume you have tea in a thermos flask. You can, and you should, sneak in more than your allotted bottle of wine per person.

Lunch fell early yesterday, due to the inclement weather. At 12.45pm when an announcement came over the loudspeaker that it was lunchtime, an elderly chap sitting behind us pulled a tin foil package from his backpack, opened it and began eating his brown bread, cheese and chutney sandwiches. I loved that he ate his lunch right on cue. Next to him were two blokes who shared a plastic tub of little cocktail sausages and Cumberland picnic eggs. I have been to Waitrose and M & S today and bought both to take tomorrow (two supermarket trips required, as Waitrose was all out of cocktail sausages).

We found my uncle and his brother-in-law during the lunch break and swigged on wine from our plastic tumblers with them. They had spotted a group of men who had what I reckon was the lunch of the day. The chief caterer in the group presented each man with a small rectangle shaped plastic plate, and served them all a spoon of what looked like chicken curry with rice and green beans. We reckon the chicken curry might’ve been coronation chicken. As we were drinking our drinks, each man was presented with a plastic tumbler full of strawberries, blueberries and raspberries.

Second best lunch of the day, if I may say so, was my own. Doorstop slices of homemade bacon and egg pie (the pie topped with two hand cut letters, N Z ) with M & S tomato chilli jam and a tub of leafy green salad that I popped wedges of lemon into, so we could dress it when we we were ready to eat. That was after having had 11am hot cups of coffee from the thermos and half a piece each of lemon slice that we picked up from Scotti’s on our way to the ground. Late afternoon there were cream cheese stuffed peppadews, a little pot of cubes of cheese and pickles from M & S, and M & S cheese shortbreads. My uncle, who moved to sit next to us, had a tube of Pringles, which was exactly what we needed after the wine and pints that kept appearing from out of no where.

The blokes from Devon and Cornwall remarked on how impressed they were by our picnic. They were particularly taken by the tomato chilli jam, and said their dry old ham sandwiches only had salad cream on them. I did try and offer them some chilli jam, but they were British (far too polite). They apparently dubbed me Mary Poppins, because I had the bag of tricks that kept on giving.

Now that I have penned this little note, it’s time for me to go and begin preparations for tomorrow’s picnic. A new recipe is involved, so you’ll hear more about that soon.