The lawn of St James’s Square at lunch time offers about as much personal space during the summer as a gannet colony in the breeding season. But ask anyone searching for a patch of grass to sit on with their soup and sushi and they will tell you, lunch al fresco elbow-room only is still better than al desko. If the ground is damp underbottom, the soup and sushi the same temperature, so what? It is more than a grabbed bite under the plane trees. It is a little picnic, the most natural thing in the world to do given a hint of blue sky and dappled shade. Nothing sums up the simple enjoyment of life better than a picnic. Which is a paradox because the picnic, for all its uncomplicated joy, is a sophisticated pleasure. It hints at Neolithic camp-fire jollity, but at its heart is the revolutionary idea that Nature is something to be sought out as charming and spiritually refreshing rather than feared or exploited. This is a commonplace notion to us weaned on the Romantics, but without it the whole business where ‘one has a home and eats out of doors by choice’ , as Osbert Sitwell points out in his essay Picnics and Pavilions (1944), is inconceivable. William Wordsworth et al. were intrepid picnic pioneers. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was inspired to write the Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) on an excursion to the Quantocks, and if the picnic Holy Grail combines perfect spot, memorable conversation and delicious food, then Wordsworth found it on Helvellyn summit with Humphry Davy and Walter Scott. The moment was so moving Wordsworth was unable to express his emotions, not even recollected in tranquillity afterwards. The Romantics roused such
A Moveable Feast The picnic, despite its associations with sandwiches in Tupperware and windswept British beaches, has an illustrious and exotic history, as Benedict Flynn describes 18 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
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