The Picnic, or: A Entirely Avoidable Situation That We Keep Choosing

Every year, usually sometime in May, I make the same mistake.

The sun comes out with a conviction it hasn't shown since October. The temperature reaches something genuinely pleasant, not the provisional mildness of March that tricks you into leaving the house without a coat and then withdraws without apology, but real warmth, the kind that makes the outdoors feel like somewhere a person might reasonably spend time. And I think: a picnic. I should have a picnic.

I would like to say I don't know why I keep thinking this. But I do know why. It's because the picnic, as a concept, is one of the most appealing things the human mind can produce. The reality is a different matter entirely.

In the imagined picnic — the one that happens in the part of the brain responsible for optimism and poor decisions — everything is straightforward. A blanket on a gentle slope. A wicker basket containing things that travel well, whatever those are. Wine at the correct temperature. Bread that is still good. Cheese that has not done anything alarming in the heat. No insects with a specific interest in the proceedings. Soft light. Perhaps a view. Everyone comfortable, nobody on a gradient.

In the actual picnic, the blanket is never quite flat because the ground is never quite flat, and you spend the first ten minutes shifting to find a position that doesn't involve a concealed root applying itself to your left hip. The wine is warm because the journey took longer than expected and the cool bag was optimistic. The bread is good for about twenty-five minutes and then becomes the kind of thing you eat because you paid for it. The cheese is fine. The cheese is always fine. I will say this for cheese: it travels with dignity.

The insects arrive at the moment you open anything. This is not coincidence. This is, as far as I can tell, physics.

The picnic has a longer and more complicated history than it has any right to, given that it is essentially eating outside on the ground. The word itself comes from the French pique-nique, which appeared in the late seventeenth century and referred initially to an indoor meal to which each guest brought a dish — less a pastoral outing than a Dutch courage arrangement for people who couldn't cook. The outdoor version developed through the eighteenth century, particularly in France and England, and by the early nineteenth century had become sufficiently established as a social occasion that it required organisation, correct equipment, and the right kind of company.

The Victorians, characteristically, took this and made it more elaborate than anyone had requested. The picnic baskets of the late nineteenth century were engineered objects, fitted with compartments for specific plates and specific glasses, with straps to hold everything in place, with spirit lamps for keeping things warm, with enough infrastructure to suggest that the aim was less to eat outdoors and more to bring the indoors outdoors in its entirety, which rather defeats the original purpose but was clearly satisfying to someone.

By the twentieth century the picnic had been democratised into something more recognisable: a blanket, a basket, whatever was in the fridge, the persistent English hope that the weather would hold. The spirit lamp had not survived the transition. The warm wine had.

There is a specific hierarchy of picnic foods that has evolved, I think, through natural selection. At the top: things that are good at room temperature and improve with informality. Bread. Hard cheese. Cured meat. Olives. Fruit that doesn't bruise easily. Anything in a jar. These are the picnic aristocracy and they know it.

In the middle: things that are fine but require management. Sandwiches, which are excellent for approximately two hours and then begin a rapid decline. Potato salad, which is wonderful when made properly and requires a spoon, and nobody ever remembers to bring a spoon. Hard boiled eggs, which travel perfectly but produce a social awkwardness in enclosed spaces, and while a meadow is not enclosed, it is surprising how localised the problem remains.

At the bottom, where they do not belong, because someone brings them every time with high hopes: crisps, which are destroyed by humidity and gone in four minutes anyway; cherry tomatoes that roll off the plate and are never found; and anything involving pastry, which arrives in a container looking like a tart and is removed from the container looking like the memory of a tart.

The drinks situation is its own section. Hot coffee from a flask: underrated, genuinely excellent, the move that separates the experienced picnicker from the romantic. Cold beer from a cool bag: excellent for forty minutes, tepid for the rest. Wine: I refer you to my earlier comments about the cool bag being optimistic.

The French approach to this, as with most things involving food and leisure, is instructive. The French picnic — and I have attended enough of them to speak with some confidence — operates on the principle that eating outdoors is simply eating, and should be conducted accordingly. This means proper glasses, real plates, actual cutlery, cloth napkins, a baguette that was purchased that morning, pâté, at least two cheeses chosen with intention rather than convenience, and a bottle of wine that has been kept somewhere sensible. The whole enterprise is assembled and laid out with a thoroughness that makes the English version look like a crisis response.

And yet. And yet there is something about the English picnic — the warm wine and the sandy sandwiches and the blanket that is always slightly too small and the business of eating a scotch egg in a field while a cloud approaches with suspicious speed — that I cannot entirely abandon. It is not elegant. It is not optimal. It requires a tolerance for minor discomfort and the ability to find this funny rather than frustrating.

But the light in May is good. The fields are green. And there is, it turns out, something specifically pleasant about eating outside in a country where the outdoors remains slightly unreliable, because you are always aware that it might not last, that this particular afternoon is a small gift that could be withdrawn at any moment, and that awareness makes you pay attention to it in a way that perfect weather, paradoxically, does not.

Last May I had a picnic on a hill with a long view and a bag that contained, if I'm honest, mostly cheese and good intentions. The blanket was too small. The wine was room temperature within the hour. A wasp discovered the bread and I let it have the bread because life is too short.

At some point in the afternoon the light went golden and the view did what good views do when you're not expecting it, which is to make you briefly aware of how large everything is and how small you are in it, and how rare it is to sit somewhere with no particular reason to move.

I stayed until the light changed. The cheese was, as I said, excellent throughout.

I'm already planning to do it again.