England v Pakistan at Lord’s, Day Two and Four, 15 and 17 July 2016

Friday 15 July

DJ was my guest on the Friday. I made the picnic and set off on my trek even earlier today, as I wanted to drop some Lord’s Throdkins off at the Middlesex office. I shall probably write a separate piece on the progress of The Lord’s Throdkin  as a “thing” for King Cricket – click here for the recipe and story of the delicacy’s origins.

DJ was bang on time for the start of the game. Minor adaptations to the picnic for DJ, as he doesn’t like anything with butter in it, so (for example) I went for conventional smoked salmon with cream cheese bagel to avoid the need for butter.

Even more so than the Thursday – reported here – the day just seemed to whizz by. We did talk about the political situation a bit. Also about mutual friends and family, although when Janie asked me “did you discuss such-and-such” the answer was usually “no, DJ and I don’t really talk about that sort of thing”. We did talk about music a fair bit and both noted down some tunes to work on ahead of our next jam in a few weeks time.

I had promised DJ that I would show him the real tennis court after stumps. This I did, but was gutted to find that no-one was playing during that 18:00-19:00 slot – what a bunch of wastrels – I played during that hour on the Friday of the Sri Lanka test match! No matter. I showed DJ the court and tried to explain the game to him; I’m sure there’ll be another occasion.

Sunday 17 July

Despite the self-inflicted sore heads from the night before – click here for explanation – Janie and I got to Lord’s nice and early to get a good choice of seats in the new Warner stand.

Janie wanted mostly shade, so we (I) did some trigonometry and worked out where we could sit that would lose the sun by virtue of the lower tier canopy quite early, without being too deep in the bowels of the back of the stand. It worked – see photo above, taken by a kindly gentleman sporting a fair bit of egg and bacon-coloured clothing.

Soon enough the Lord’s fresh air and ambience weaved its magic on us and soothed our sore heads.

Janie’s picnic was based around mini sausages and meatballs, with carrot sticks, tomatoes and dips. We hadn’t had that style of picnic for a good while, as until this day I have been the picnic monitor so far this season.

We took two bottles of white with us but, mostly as a result of the excesses of the previous evening, eked out one bottle and took the other bottle home with us.

We weren’t really expecting England to overcome Pakistan’s score, but they did show fight at times (whereas at other times we thought the whole thing might unravel around tea-time). In the end, we got pretty-much a whole days play and reluctantly had to agree that justice had been done in a very good test match – see scorecard here.

In any case, Janie and I had very much enjoyed our day. We had booked Monday off as a precautionary measure, so we were now free to do those other things on our list, ahead of going to Southwark for a Monday evening concert at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, which I shall report upon soon enough.