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A Lucky Egg-scape*

A cautionary tale about a caramel egg and my trouser pocket


Yesterday I gave a talk in Brighton to an audience of 15 year olds.  I took with me some chocolate prizes for games, including two caramel eggs.  What followed was a game of fortunately-unfortunately.

Fortunately – I ended up with a spare ‘prize’ caramel egg after the Brighton talk.  “I’ll eat that later” I thought, as I put it in my pocket.

Unfortunately – having put it in my pocket, I then forgot it was there.

Fortunately – I did find it just before I went to bed in Oxford last night.

Unfortunately – for the first time in ages, I hadn’t bothered to bring a spare pair of trousers with me for the following morning, when I was due to give a keynote talk to a teacher conference.

Fortunately – although the egg had gone very soft, it still had its foil wrapper around it and hadn’t leaked.

Unfortunately – I now decided to unwrap it as I fancied treating myself to a late night sweet.

Fortunately – As I unwrapped it I found that the outside chocolate was still intact, if soft.  So I decided to take a bite out of it.

Unfortunately – Unknown to me, the inside had turned into a pool of liquid caramel, .

Fortunately – I almost instantly realised what had happened.

Unfortunately – I was too slow to come up with a strategy to save the situation, and watched helplessly as the caramel gushed out.

Fortunately – as the liquid caramel spilled, by some miracle it missed my trousers.

Unfortunately – it did spill on to the nice carpet in my room.

                    *                           *                       *                            *

And that, Jesus College Oxford, with my sincere apologies, is why there’s now a bit of a brown stain on the carpet in the guest room.  I think it should wash out ok.  I hope you’ll see that the story behind the mysterious brown stain could have been worse for you….and had things turned out a little differently, it could have been far, far worse for me.  I would not have enjoyed trying to explain it to my audience this morning.

 

 

* My thanks to Zoe Griffiths for the title of the blog.