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Although almost certain death camps out on Morris' dusty patio, help arrives... carrying a tuba.

Music, orchestral ramblings and the little-known history of the ubiquitous eggcup.

There's one important thing about Shropshire that a lot of people, even those fortunate enough to live there, often forget.

It's this.

There're a lot of very nice cafes there, and in those very nice cafes you can nearly always get a very nice soft boiled egg with toast soldiers.

Anther thing. What came first, the soft-boiled egg or the toast soldier?

And who invented the eggcup?

I've never been able to find out.

I know that images of eggcups appear as early as 3AD in Turkish mosaics; I know that ancient eggcups were discovered in ruins of Pompeii dating from 79AD.

In the 19th century it was not uncommon to carry a portable eggcup made of wood or silver. I know there's a lady in Ludlow called Henrietta Cushing who has a collection of 12,482 decorative eggcups, and she knows them all by secret names.

I can imagine a world without cars, without television, without video recorders, without non-stick frying pans, coat hangers, DVD players, flushing cisterns and double-glazing, but I can't, for one moment, imagine life without eggcups.

Yet the name of the originator of the eggcup is lost in the mists of time.

While history was busy recording who won what battle and who begat who, they forgot to write down who it was that invented the eggcup.

It's a terrible shame. I presume they came from Shropshire, but I want to know more about them, if anyone reading this finds out, or is a direct descendant of the inventor of the eggcup, please get in touch.

I'm still very hungry. I find myself spending a disproportionate amount of my day thinking about food. Specifically I seem to be obsessing about egg and toast related meals.

Toast is growing from my arms and legs, like little hairy soldiers taunting me.

When I try to grab them to dip in the eggs that have formed on my chest, they retreat back inside my limbs.

I know rationally that it is very unlikely that I have started spontaneously growing soft boiled eggs from my torso, little white domes of temptation rising majestically from my midriff, but worst of all are the yolks... the beautiful, twinkling yolks, beckoning me forward, pools of golden eggness swimming in a perfect free-range shell.

They look so full and yellow and runny and I want them more than life itself.

In the distance I imagine I can hear beautiful music, gently floating in across the dusty dust.

My vision was blurring. I think I had begun to digest my own internal organs and I was fixated on eating soft-boiled eggs. More so than usual that is.

Then by a stroke of good fortune I was rescued by the Greek Philharmonic Orchestra, just as I was really beginning to feel quite unwell.

They were practicing quite near me. Their coaches parked in a circle and the full orchestra set up in the middle. A wheeled coliseum sent by Mother Shropshire to act as my personal cavalry.

The Tuba player, Demeter, found me when he wandered off to practice in solitude. I was dipping pieces of rock, which in my weakened state I had mistaken for fingers of toast, into my belly button, which in my weakened state I had mistaken for a soft-boiled egg.

I'm quite exceptionally sore.

The Orchestra travels in a convoy of coaches, and they seem very nice.

They do play a lot of very loud Death Metal music, which struck me as a bit odd for classically-trained musicians. Demeter explained to me that after a day of Strauss, Bach, Mozart, Holst, Mahler and Vivaldi, they often fancy a change of pace and like to take in some Corpse Incubador, Mucus Skin Infection, Bloodbeast and Gutted Souls.

Hestia, who looks a bit like a startled fish with a violin, but not in an unattractive way, is very kindly nursing me back to health. I have my own bunk, lots of new friends to talk to about Shropshire and I feel confident I shall be performing at full strength again in next to no time.

I am constantly amazed by the kindness of strangers; the people I meet on my travels often give of themselves without a moment's hesitation. Some of them, of course, try to kill me without a moment's hesitation, but most of them are as nice as warm gingerbread.

Hestia kindly made me, after I asked her a few times, some soft-boiled egg and toast soldiers. She didn't remove the crusts, and she removed the top of the egg in an irregular ellipse, but otherwise it was absolutely perfect.

Sitting here now on my bunk, by the window, looking at the unfamiliar landscape hurry past, I realise that the great thing about Europe, aside from its relative proximity to Shropshire, is that it's all connected.

You can drive from one country to another with relative ease and without getting wet, so I might stay with the convoy a day or two for the free ride.

Spent most of the day lying on my bunk, watching the Grecian scenery like a one-way tennis tournament.

Like dog owners, musicians often grow to fit their instruments in some way.

Xylophonists have the arched posture of a preying mantis, oboe players tend to be a bit whiny and trombone players often have chronic wind.

I'm on the strings section coach and I can see that everyone is highly strung.

The Double Bass player, Heracles, seems to have some sort of symbiotic relationship with his instrument. They sleep together, eat together, he talks to his double bass as you might to a child and he doesn't let anyone else touch it.

I've never actually seen him leave its side, so whether or not they are actually surgically attached, they may as well be.

I used to know a farmer called Alan who had a similar relationship with his combine harvester. He called the combined harvester Nellie - It weighed eight tons, could rotor crop a three-acre field in seven minutes and had a custom paint job reminiscent of the Memphis Belle.

He decided to take Nellie on holiday to Blackpool and managed to get her up to 45-mph on the M6.

He ploughed through the first four roadblocks without even noticing them, before veering off the Motorway and across some fields towards the coast.

The news said that he drove down Blackpool promenade, showed Nellie the illuminations and then they both drove straight into the Irish Sea, like a giant agricultural Thelma and Louise.

The funny thing is they never found the wreckage.

Some say Alan had custom-fitted Nellie to be a sub-aqua combine harvester; he drove a furrow across the seabed and is now a mercenary harvester for hire in New Mexico

Others say that Nellie was in fact Alan's omni-sexual alien machine hybrid bride and they returned to her home planet where he is venerated as a farmer god.

Still others say that if you drive anything weighing eight tons into the Irish Sea, it's hardly very surprising if you never see it again.

We are heading for Albania where they have a concert booked in three days time.

The wind section is undermanned after a French horn and a Bassoon went AWOL in Macedonia, so I've volunteered to stand in on French horn. I can't actually play the French horn, but this shouldn't be a problem.

Just as most offices have a percentage of staff who don't do anything... who fill their days drinking tea, making complex geometric shapes from bent paperclips, browsing the internet and trying to find new and exciting things to do with PowerPoint, and yet are still an integral part of the office structure; all orchestras have a percentage of members that don't or can't play an instrument.

The Greek Philharmonic Orchestra seems to have more than its fair share of non-musical members.

So far I've met 32 musicians who admit to just pretending to play when the conductor, Efthimios, points at them. Most say they joined the Orchestra for the social side without any formal musical training and hope to just pick it up as they go along.

Hestia tells me they once had an outbreak of flu just before performing in Belgrade and it wasn't until they started the first overture they realised that the only one not pretending to play was Heracles.

He had to do Strauss's Sinfonia Domestica alone on his double bass accompanied only by himself on a kazoo and a bit of clapping near the end from some sympathetic audience members.

The Belgrade Musical Express rated the performance as "a groundbreaking and brave attempt at redefining a genre".

Next time you go and see a live orchestra, look out for the 13% of the strings section that are reading magazines, texting on their mobiles and napping during the performance.

The conductor of the Greek Philharmonic invited me for a dinner party today on the lead coach. He's called Efthimios. He looks like Howard Stern and his idea of dressing casually for dinner is brightly patterned Bermuda Shots and Flip Flops.

We ate a hearty meal of Greek delicacies and talked for much of the day about Shropshire, Moreton Say, the importance of cultural diversity and the chances of Violated Scream Rats getting a break in the mainstream music charts.

Then Efthimios gave me and a couple of backpackers from Cyprus (who we picked up just after me) a brief slide presentation on Greek Mythology, which involved spinning discs and flashing lights.

I don't remember all of it but we all agreed it had some very persuasive things to say about staying with the Greek Philharmonic Orchestra for a while and seeing how it goes, which seems quite reasonable.

Then we all retired to a hot tub where Efthimios waved a little stick at us while we did some little underwater dances he had choreographed over dinner.

I'm very tired now. I'm going to bed... though to be honest I'd sleep much better if they'd just turn down the music slightly.

I've jammed some digestive biscuit in each ear to muffle the effect - it's quite a pleasant sensation but I'm concerned about what future damage may be caused by crumbs in my ear canals.