Cream tea carnage at sea

The crew's 'scone mad' on a Thames barge

- Dave Selby

Safety at sea is something you can never ever take too seriously, as I well know as a sometime third hand in a customer service role on a Thames sailing barge that operates in the highly perilous cream-tea trade.

In general, most barge skippers prefer less explosive cargo… such as explosives, for example, as the sticky tea business has landed many a skipper and crew in a jam and driven them to easier professions, like smuggling brandy from France.

All in all, the terrors of cream teas are enough to make you yearn for the good old days when barges carried hay and bricks outward and returned with a load of steaming horse dung from the streets of Victorian London. Sadly those days are ‘long scone’.

On land, cream teas are merely a threat to your cholesterol levels, though in some of the rougher tea rooms in Maldon, brawls have also been known to break out over the unresolved controversy of which goes on rst, the clotted cream or the jam.

The sea, however, is a great leveller where such polite niceties are of no consequence because the cream-tea crowd prefer to spread it all over the deck and spend the day slithering into the scuppers on a 95ft skating rink resembling a giant Eton mess.