Just Not Cricket

This conversation happened last night:

Me (looking out of the window): Gosh, Lord's really is a lot smaller than I thought it would be.
My friend Tim:  Er, that's not the actual pitch.  It's just where they practice.
Me:  Oh.  (long pause)  So, this wine is nice, isn't it?

which tells you all you need to know, I think, about my grasp of cricket.

If you know Lord's, incidentally, we were in the Nursery Pavillion, which overlooks the Nursery Ground.  If you don't know Lord's, the Nursery Ground is where they do drills and things (what do you mean, that's not a proper cricketing term?) and some minor club teams play there sometimes.  It looks like this:

 
This picture doesn't do anything to show how small it was, in fact it looks bigger here than it did in real life.  Stupid picture.  Or, more accurately, badly chosen picture which I don't have time to replace.  You'll just have to believe me when I say: the Nursery Ground is pretty small. (Yes, yes, I know: the clue is in the name. I see that now. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.).

Anyway, back to the wine.  It was all from Portugal, where they make nicer wine than you might think, but don't export a lot of it (nearly all of the producers I spoke to were still trying to find UK agents to sell on their behalf) which is a shame.  Did you know, by the way, that Cliff Richard owns a vinyard in Portugal?  Me neither.  I do now, although I didn't get to try any of his wine.  I am now fighting the urge to make a lame joke about mistletoe.   I did try lots of other wine, and some particularly spectacular white port. (Still fighting the urge, with every fibre of my being, but it's a struggle.  Be warned.)

So, I saw less interesting parts of Lord's than I thought I would last night, but 'less interesting' is a relative term and the wine was less 'less interesting', so I'm not too worried. Plus, the media centre, which looks a bit like a giant space-ship, is quite cool. 

Here's a photo:

It's not the media centre at Lord's (you'll have to Google that) but it does also looks a bit like a spaceship, and it reminded me that I have a ton of 'here's a cool building / sign / whatever ' photos from New York I still haven't got around to posting yet.