Apparently it’s quite common for people in middle age to go through a breakfast crisis. Folk who have spent their lives beginning the day on a bowl of cereal with milk suddenly feel a powerful compulsion to stop mixing dairy and arable in their breakfast bowl and turn to some form of brutalised avocado instead.
This is caused, in part, by propaganda but there is a physical aversion that takes place too. For example, I’ve found that with each passing year my milk threshold falls. I used to love the point in a bowl of Cornflakes when there were no more Cornflakes and you could just spoon cool milk into your slavering maw. Delicious. These days, the mere thought of all that milk causes a reflexive response somewhere in the abdominal area that I used to only feel when Cliff Richard came on the radio.
I know what you’re thinking: “That’s your fault for listening to radio stations that play Cliff Richard.” Fair point, but it’s not helping to solve my breakfast problem. Due to a passing interest in my long-term health, I tend to eat more wholegrain cereals these days, which is a punishment in itself, and I regulate the amount of milk so there is just enough to prevent the little pieces of cardboard from being completely inedible but none to have to finish off when the hard work is done. Frankly, it’s taking the joy out of the most important meal of the day.
So why all this angst? Well, I believe I’m suffering with a form of PTSD from an incident that took place at the breakfast bar of a Baltic ferry back in 1994. Presented with a choice of cold meats and cheeses or muesli, I chose the latter on the basis that cold meat and cheese is lunch, not breakfast, whereas muesli does at least have a modicum of cerealness about it. My dad had introduced muesli into the household in the 80s, during what I now recognise as his mid-life breakfast crisis, and I’d grown quite partial to it. (It was also around this time that I learned that ‘stool’ has more than one meaning).
So I helped myself to a bowl of the ferry company’s finest but when I went to pour on the milk it landed with a sickening plop in the middle of my muesli. I looked around and realised, like some hapless victim in a psychological horror film, that I was on board a ship full of Scandinavians eating yogurt on their cereal – and there was no escape!
I was reminded of this incident this week when my friend Damian wrote to ask me to explain the phrase ‘cream of the crop’. “Why was there cream on the crop?” he asked, quite reasonably. My instinctive response was that there never would be cream on any crop, but then I remembered the yogurt on my oats and I thought hmm, this could be worth investigating.
I found three possible explanations. The first involves riding crops, those long whippy things horse riders use to spur their steed onwards. Before the use of fibreglass, these things consisted of a stick wound with leather. In order to preserve the longevity of their crop, riders would treat the leather with some form of proprietary cream, which kept it supple and water resistant. Thus it was common to find cream on your crop.
The second explanation goes back to the days when members of the House of Lords liked to unwind from the stresses of persecuting the poor and guzzling port by subjecting themselves to being beaten across the bare buttocks with a horse whip and drizzled with fresh cream – a custom that is still observed among the more traditional members of the House today. Somewhere amid the cackling and flying feathers they might hear the exclamation, “Oh look, mi’lord, I’ve gone and got cream on me crop.”
Neither of these explain the idiom ‘cream of the crop’, though, do they? The third and most plausible explanation is that it’s just a bad idiom. What you’ve got going on here is a mixed metaphor – part dairy, part arable. Crops don’t have cream (unless you’re harvesting coconuts, which we’re not), so it lacks the visual reinforcement that makes most idioms effective. In fact, it’s ridiculous.
Still, no-one’s complained for 400 years so we can probably let it go.
