Food
Michele Roberts wants a few nude men at her picnic
Published 19 May 2003
I want to picnic with Jane Austen, George Eliot - and a nude man or two
I want to go on a picnic. Perhaps just to daydream about doing so, since the weather in late spring is usually wet. Lush with new greenery the country may be, foaming with white fruit blossom, with hawthorn and lilac, but, none the less, the grass is damp. So you pack a big umbrella and huddle in your waterproofs and munch sandwiches soggy with rain, and they taste delicious anyway, because you are outdoors doing what you want, having a treat.
A picnic: food eaten with pleasure outside the house. As a child, I liked seeing a different side of the women in the family emerge, once they were released from the kitchen. They seemed wilder, freer. Laughing and smoking, bare-legged, they gossiped and lolled. My beloved aunt Brigitte, taking us on summer trips through France in her Deux Chevaux, would park beside a bridge over a river. Out would come the back seat, instantly transformed into bucolic sofa, alongside the folding table made by my carpenter grandfather, and the army rug for us children to sprawl on. We stuck our thumbs through the holes in the brightly coloured plastic picnic plates shaped like artists' palettes, and loaded up.
We drank cider and ate halved tomatoes, craggy and fat, sprinkled with salt, tasting of earth and sweetness and sun. We ate melon and bread and cheese, often leftovers. I remember cold roast veal chopped into rice. On her deathbed, my elder sister told me that was the best meal she'd ever had. When I was 14, walking with Brigitte in Burgundy, we enjoyed evening picnics at the edges of cornfields: a tin of petits pois opened, then placed directly over the Campingaz, eggs broken into this green soupiness and poached.
Some people turn theatrical about picnics. Remember Mrs Elton, in Emma, planning to raid Mr Knightley's strawberry beds? She proposes arriving by donkey, wearing a simple straw hat, all charming and genteelly gypsyish, before picnicking alfresco in the garden. To prevent Mr Woodhouse fainting with horror, lunch for the gentry subsequently gets laid out in the cool of the dining room.
Really, all you need is two big pockets, a bottle in one and a brown paper bag full of goodies in the other. In Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers's thriller-writing sleuth heroine Harriet Vane reminisces about how as a poor, shabby undergraduate returning after the vacation to her Oxford college, she would picnic en route under a hedge, free and fierce and alone. In an earlier novel, Harriet, on a solitary walking tour, picnics on a beach just before discovering a corpse, and later on, dressed deliberately seductively in clingy white crepe and a picture hat, nudges the murderer, at another seaside picnic, into revealing himself. I do like the way that Harriet is generally fortified by a good lunch before being obliged to deal with dead bodies.
If you plan to lay on the lavish sort of archery picnic that George Eliot's Gwendolyn Harleth shines at, in a remote glade in the heart of the forest now tastefully furnished with Turkish carpets and silver tea urns, then you certainly need servants. (Do you think these minions carted chamber pots, too? Or did the aristocrats discreetly vanish behind trees, like the rest of us? I long to know.) If we act as our own bearers, then we decide whether heavy hampers and cool bags are really necessary. If you want to lay the food out, I do think real tablecloths are nicer than paper ones or none, and I'd rather hump real glasses and china plates the distance than serve out of dismal little Tupperware boxes. That's my food snobbery. Each to his own.
Picnic food should still look beautiful. One of the sweetest picnics of my life was eaten at a service station on the M1 near Birmingham, on the grass behind the petrol pumps, Gorgonzola and black olives produced unexpectedly from a rucksack and spread out on a large, blue checked handkerchief. Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe, on the other hand, was dressed with a nude woman, reclining.
I want to go on a picnic with Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dorothy Sayers and Edouard Manet. And sure, a nude man or two.
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