I Hate Picnics.
How I learned to loathe eating al fresco.
Jean-Paul Sartre famously declared that hell is other people. Whilst I am not entirely persuaded by the great existentialist on every point, I find myself in broad sympathy with his diagnosis whenever somebody proposes a summer picnic.
The sun emerges, the mercury begins its annual ascent, and suddenly friends and family members across the country develop an irresistible urge to descend upon parks, beauty spots and miscellaneous expanses of vaguely picturesque grass in order to consume sausage rolls and M&S picky bits.
Now, let me be perfectly clear: I adore picky bits. Marks & Spencer occupies a near-sacrosanct position in my culinary affections. It is the picnic itself to which I object. The picnic is, in my view, the most overstimulating, inconvenient and fundamentally exasperating mode of dining yet devised by modern civilisation.
Consider the experience. You arrive at your chosen beauty spot with visions of pastoral tranquillity, only to discover that several hundred other people have been struck by precisely the same inspiration. Every picnic bench is occupied. Every patch of shade has long since been annexed. Instead, you find yourself marinating in direct sunlight, slowly rendering like one of the cocktail sausages perspiring gently in your own hamper.
Then there are the people. Dear God, the people. Shrieking children operating at frequencies previously thought perceptible only to bats and specialised military equipment. Dogs - and I say this as somebody who adores dogs - that have evidently never encountered the concept of discipline and spend the afternoon attempting to liberate your scotch eggs. Nearby, somebody is invariably broadcasting music through a portable speaker. To describe it as music is often an act of conspicuous charity.
Eventually, you unfurl the blanket and lower yourself onto it. This is where matters deteriorate with remarkable efficiency. As a stocky six-foot-four Yorkshireman, sitting cross-legged on the ground feels less like relaxation and more like an ill-advised experiment in advanced yoga. Every position becomes intolerable after approximately three minutes. Limbs migrate. Joints begin filing formal complaints. The sun beats down with relentless determination.
Then my hayfever arrives.
Being positioned in such intimate proximity to several thousand blades of grass triggers an immediate biological insurrection. My eyes stream. My nose runs. My sinuses descend into outright anarchy. Frankly, I consider myself fortunate that I can detect the flavour of the mini Melton Mowbray pork pies through the astonishing volume of mucus being produced by my own body.
No sooner have I recovered sufficiently to reach for a chicken drumstick than nature launches its next offensive. A wasp appears. Not frightening, merely irritating. Much like the man with the speaker. It circles. It hovers. It lands. It returns. Every mouthful becomes an exercise in tactical vigilance.
And then there is the food itself, languishing beneath the summer heat. The cheese sweats. The dips drift beyond their optimal temperature. Somebody inevitably forgets napkins, cutlery or both. Every picnic seems to be organised with enormous enthusiasm and a quite breathtaking absence of practical foresight.
To make matters worse, there is always one participant who has recently spent rather too much time on social media. This individual will produce strawberries and a bar of chocolate before announcing an intention to melt the latter in the sun. What follows is never elegant. Chocolate migrates onto everything. Fingers become sticky. Blankets become sticky. The pristine white T-shirt selected that morning ceases to be pristine. No quantity of oxygen bleach will reverse the calamity.
God, picnics make me miserable.
And yet, they possess one redeeming feature. Those little pre-mixed cocktail tins. Warm from the sun, perhaps. Slightly metallic tasting, certainly. But after several hours of grass-induced suffering, wasp harassment and communal inconvenience, they provide just enough relief to render the entire experience marginally more tolerable.
Which, I suppose, is the closest thing a picnic has to a happy ending.
Do you hate picnics too? Or do you adore them? Let me know!
Ah, this is indeed the reality. Except the screeching children are on my head. And I can't drink the pre-mixed cocktail tinnies!