After "Please come to my superhero-themed fancy dress wedding" the most distressing leisure time proposition in the English language has to be: "Fancy a lovely picnic?" No, I don't. Picnics are never lovely. Picnics are where lunch goes to die.
Yes, I know. I'm not meant to say this. It's high summer, a time when, by convention, magazines are given over to gloriously photographed picnic features, many of which I have contributed to. And so a confession: each time I have done so, I have been colluding in one big fat lie.
We dream of a life that echoes the pages of a the Boden catalogue, in which all women look good in a wrap dress, all men look fine with their top three shirt buttons undone, white-toothed children entertain themselves for hours, and the elders of the tribe smile beatifically at everything about them as together we lay into a feast of such largesse the Greek gods themselves would have to invent a bunch of other gods just so they could thank them for their enormous good fortune.
The reality? It's impossible to look elegant while sitting on a sloping hillside or beach, especially at my age. Bits of me are always trying to make a bid for freedom. Sod muffin tops; I'm packing half the cake counter at Greggs. The kids are either punching each other or poking a dead, maggot-infested bird with a stick, and granny's going into advance stages of anaphylactic shock having been stung by the wasp that got bored of divebombing the last mulched-up strawberries that didn't fall out of the picnic bag when it opened accidentally.
Ah yes, picnic food. It's awful, a waste of agriculture. For here is what no glossy supplement will ever tell you: the quality of an eating experience decreases in direct proportion to the distance it travels from its point of origin. Chicken wings are lovely straight out of the oven; after six hours festering in a warm Tupperware box, eating one is as much fun as chewing on one of Gollum's sweaty knee joints. Potato salad – which had bite and a substance while cooling on your kitchen table – ends up looking like it's taken a beating in a cement mixer and is now designed only for those without recourse to teeth.
Or there's worse: the host comes over all ambitious. There's a poached fish which is falling apart quicker than Michael Jackson's face, or a roast rib of beef which looks great but which is impossible to eat because nobody thought to bring a sharp enough knife with which to carve it. The cold drinks are warm, the hot drinks are tepid, the soft fruit is mashed, the hard fruit is bruised, the quiche looks like it's already been eaten and come back out the wrong way, and even the filling of the pork pie has disengaged from the mothership of its pastry shell. Only the grapes look like grapes. This is no consolation.
I like tables. And chairs. And rooms to put them in. I regard these things as progress. The last time us Jews were forced to eat al fresco it was because the Cossacks were coming. If I want the great outdoors while eating, I'll open a bloody window. You want a picnic? Good for you. I'm staying here in the kitchen, where the food tastes nice. Have a great summer.
