Who Nicked My Pick?

According to the font of all knowledge, the Oxford English Dictionary, a picnic is "an occasion when a packed meal is eaten outdoors, especially during an outing to the countryside". 

That's as good a definition as any. I've enjoyed many alfresco meals that match that description precisely. Sandwiches, cakes, a few token salad items so that I can say I made at least a bit of an effort and, crucially, as many different processed pork products as possible. As I keep saying, there is no foodstuff in the world that cannot be improved by the addition of bacon.

But all such delights must be earned. I like to edit my manuscripts outdoors. It's a little treat to myself after the days / weeks / months locked away in my garret writing a document. I allow myself the luxury of doing a (close to) final edit in the great outdoors. I know that if I've reached that stage then the piece is almost done and a different set of surroundings helps me cast a different eye over my work and, sometimes, pick up some problems that looked perfectly alright in the solitude of my attic.

My Beloved likes to take photos of scenery and nature so it works well for the two of us to partake of our passions separately - her snapping away and me spraying my red ink over sheets of printed paper - and then coming together at the end of our respective working day for a picnic. We have the full traditional kit - tartan blanket, wicker basket full of bright neon-coloured plastic crockery and cutlery (well, I don't want to be too traditional), and of course lots of different Tupperware boxes filled with goodies. We even have a tartan flask that once belonged to my dad, a relic of my own childhood picnics.

There's only one thing wrong with eating outdoors. It's in the outdoors. There are overfriendly farm animals and walkers' dogs, smelly by-produce left by overfriendly farm animals and walkers' dogs, other people's music (a term used very loosely) shattering the varying degrees of natural silence, wet grass that seeps through your blanket and clothes leaving you feeling a particular kind of damp unpleasantness that I (for one) haven't felt since I was a toddler. And bugs. A gazillion bugs whose sole purpose in their little lives is to annoy me in some way or other. Some bite, some sting, some crawl through the hairs on my arms making me judder and others just want to walk on my food with their little feet that have been tromping goodness-knows-where. Probably some of the aforementioned biological by-product.

And of course the worst among these is wasps. There's an old German proverb that loosely translates as "God made bees but the Devil made the wasp." That's about right as far as I'm concerned. I'm not one of these people who goes into screaming flapping fits whenever a wasp appears but I certainly don't weep when I see one dying of heat stroke in the window of a cream bun shop. It serves it right for trying to eat a sausage roll a thousand times bigger than its head.

What use are wasps? They don't pollenate things like bees, don't clear up dead stuff like beetles do, don't really do much at all apart from fly around looking for unsuspecting humans to sting. Their one job as far as I can see it is to ruin picnics, and they do it with gleeful malice.

But what about when it's raining and we have to resort to eating in the car? Does that still class as a picnic? I've spent many dismal hours, man and boy, sitting in a steamy vehicle listening to the rain drumming on the car roof while munching a smelly egg sandwich. At least the wasps can't get me in my metal prison but it sort of defeats the entire object of substituting the dining room for the countryside.

Or even worse, how about those times when you've planned a picnic but the weather's suddenly turned so bad that there's no point in even leaving the house? We've got all that food that we've already prepared the day before: if we spread our feast out on the living room floor can we validly call the meal a 'carpet picnic'?

I recently even had a picnic on the deck of an almost-finished boat that was still in dry dock. We were visiting the boat builder and stopped at a shop on the way for supplies. Just bread, meat, tomatoes and (naturally) a few processed porky products. Nothing much, nothing fancy, we just spread everything out on the roof of his half-complete barge, but it was one of the best meals I'd had in ages.

You can keep your Michelin Stars.

© Shaun Finnie 2013