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 first, 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.

This is entirely the fault of customers who, despite endless safety briefings and cautions about the inherent dangers of scones at sea, will insist on trying tricky manoeuvres such as standing up.

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Worse are the ones who think they can do this with a china plate in one hand and a cup and saucer in the other.

And worse still are the ones we call ‘walkers’, of which there are two types: the ‘admirals’ pace the decks, either with both hands clasped behind their backs, or one inserted into the opening of their reefer to suggest a past act of naval heroism possibly involving an amputation; the ‘Hornblowers’ also do a lot of strutting about but with a hand raised to shield their eyes from the sun as they scan the horizon for the French, or crane their necks to study the pennant 80ft above them on the button of the top mast.

All in all, it’s a recipe for disaster when you consider that the deck of a Thames barge is basically a maze of trip hazards with more obstacles than the Grand National – and in fact, one of them is even a horse.

No one knows why anything is called what it is on a Thames barge, but for some reason, this is the name of the massive beam that runs across the aft deck at knee height and along which runs a huge iron ring which is attached to a main sheet block the size and weight of an anvil.

Horsing around

After several seasons on barges, I’ve just about become adept enough to trip over the horse and skin my shins before the main sheet block swings by to whack me on the bonce.

And it’s with the same degree of inevitability that we watch the acrobatic antics of the cream-tea customers.

First off, you’ve got your standers standing there and looking thoughtful with a pyramid of scones on a plate in one hand and a cup and saucer in the other.

It’s at about this time they realise that evolution hasn’t given them a third hand with which to feed themselves.

Some of them have wives to feed them, which is a great relief for us, but it’s when the bachelors start to show initiative and take matters into their own hands that the chaos really ramps up.

It’s a law as immutable as gravity that they’ll ponder for a bit, then put the scone tower down on the deck and occupy one hand with the tea cup and the other with the saucer.

Then along comes an admiral, who promenades around before plonking his plump posterior down on top of a scone volcano, spewing strawberries in all directions.

Hornblower, mistaking this for enemy fire, cries ‘avast behind’ which, although anatomically correct, shows a lack of respect for higher rank, and then wades waist-deep into a mountain of buttery goo.

Of course, you might think there’s a simple solution to all this carnage, but we had to ban tea trays after a particularly rowdy bunch from Switzerland turned the deck into something resembling St Moritz and started tobogganing.

We’ve banned the Swiss too, but that was on account of the yodelling.