GROUND FARCE - Pastures new: August 2012

I’ve been pummelled to within an inch of my life! Jessica Ennis may have won a gold medal for the heptathlon but this morning, I’ve woken up with bruises the size of Olympic aubergines after yesterday’s sport massage.

Groupon’s small print said nothing about the sadistic nature of these treatments. There was not a peep in the very, very illegible text just visible about a millimetre from the bottom of the printed page that suggested keeping an ice pack handy or describing the after effects of going 10 rounds with a carpet beater and losing. I now know what that vacuous literary character Anastasia Steele felt after a visit to the Red Room of Pain (oh my!) in 50 Shades of Grey as like the old joke about nuns falling down stairs, I’m about 28 shades of black and blue all over.

What's black, white & blue all over?

Anastasia Steele would certainly have pee’d her pants at the thought of the Brown Bench of Butt Clenching which aptly describes what happens when you have a sports massage on your legs. Believe me when I say it takes super-human effort not to fart when you’re lying face down on a leather couch with a muscle-bound physiotherapist pumping your feet back towards your arse cheeks! A Red Room of Pain sounds like something Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen dreamed up after 10 pints and a tikka masala.

So why have I subjected myself to this torture? Well aside from the fact that I paid good money to Groupon for the pleasure of being put through the wringer, I thought it would relieve what I call ‘cockle butt’. Cockle Butt is a little known medical condition up there with Housemaid’s Knee and Golfer’s Elbow. It commonly affects those who have spent several hours picking cockles at the seaside. Tightening of thigh, hamstring and butt muscles is the result of 2 hours of bending, squatting and generally scrabbling round in the sand looking for these tasty shellfish. Sitting becomes very painful after a good cockling session thus making a sports massage seem like a good idea at the time.

Picking cockles requires stamina, the desire to sift through tons of smelly mud and a knack for knowing where these things might be hiding. Like gardening, it’s a past-time that yields great rewards as we picked a bucket load of cockles between tides, dispelling the popular myth (according to Charminster’s own Ancient Mariner) that you’ve got to be up at the crack of dawn and Chinese to pick cockles.

She sells sea shells on the seashore

And that’s not the half of it. Cooking and shelling cockles is even more arduous than picking them. For starters, you need at least 2 old saucepans, a large colander and asbestos fingers. The shelled cockles are washed in cold water having been left in the bucket to purge themselves overnight then placed into a covered saucepan where after about 5 minutes they steam themselves open. They are then hooked out of their shells with a fork and subjected to another thorough rinsing in cold water to remove any left-over grit or sand. Freshly cooked cockles can be sprinkled with vinegar or lemon juice for a delicious snack (low cal!)

200g jar of Van Smirren cockles £2.18 making our haul worth around £43

After cooking and shelling, our bucket load of cockles weighed in just below 2 kg.

So whilst I’m now wincing at the sight of the office chair, I have the satisfaction of knowing that when cockling becomes the next Olympic event I shall be up on that podium like all those other great athletes before me bravely clutching my medal and my battered thighs for Queen and country.