Who’s Picnic Is This?

By the time I’d reached eight (and what I hoped would be middle-age) I’d mastered very few things. My weak grasp of left and right got me thrown from a glove shop, I ate my Sunday meal with Chopsticks, I wore trousers round my ankles, socks round my knees, and I couldn’t cut my own hair – unlike my friend Alex who cut his own and everyone else’s. This is certainly not a woe ridden piece of stigmata because along with space travel, time-travel, pre-travel, post-travel, traveller’s checks, Travel Morrison, Travelodge, I had managed, in my wholly specialised brilliance to master Picnic preparation and consumption. The ingredients were simple; call Ol and Alex, shove six mint Clubs, a bottle of spring water and a few ham sandwiches in a bag, find a hill, climb hill, eat picnic, roll in much mud, and laugh until we cry/die. As there was nothing left for me to learn in this particular ‘field’ I moved on – and unfortunately never mastered another damn thing.

Last night, eighteen years after those heady days, I was called upon to attend another Picnic. I accepted, and swaggered into the party with my customary bag full of ham sandwiches, a cheeky grin and the declaration “which hill we climbing today, ladies?” To my complete (hmmm) surprise the ‘beautifully scenic’ hills/mountains were nothing more than eye-candy for a surreptitious crowd of gaggle-hawkers. I’d been deceived and no amount of lake, candle or velour table cloth was going to hide the fact that Ol and Alex were, no doubt, in the mountains of Shanghai, drinking spring water, rolling in mud and laughing at their lack of ham sandwich sustenance, sans me.

High heels to a Picnic - the times they are a changin’.