It being 7 May and something of a holiday in these parts, we
decided on a picnic. I disinterred the
picnic basket from the garage, to find that there were potato crisps, cakes and
biscuits left over from the last time it was used, approximately seven months
ago. The crisps were soft, the biscuits
well past their sell-by date, and the cakes seemed to have disintegrated into black mush made up of live bacteria. The whole kit and caboodle went in
the bin.
The temperature outside was 8
degrees centigrade and the wind chill brought it down well below that. The
Times had helpfully said that last Christmas Day was warmer, albeit
marginally, than today.
I packed the
picnic basket with a flask of coffee, some bread rolls, and some sandwich
spreads as well as various bits of crockery and cutlery. I had ruled out the East Lothian coast which,
in this weather, is about as welcoming as a session with Professor Moriarty
under the Reichenbach
Falls
I chose instead a picnic site called Whiteadder on
the very cusp of the Scottish Borders, next to a huge reservoir generally teeming with
anglers. The huge picnic site was entirely deserted. It was not hard to see why. Stepping from the car was like stepping into
a tumble-drier. When the glaciers rolled over this part of the countryside,
they created the perfect conditions for a wind tunnel – hills on either side
and a deep valley gorge which runs in more or less a straight line from west to
east, the prevalent direction of the wind.
I tried to make a wind-break by laying two extended folding chairs on
their side on top of the fixed picnic table thoughtfully provided by the
Council and tying a red throw around them, but the whole lot blew over into the
tuna and sweetcorn and I had the devil of a job straightening out the mess again. Then I tried an unfurled golf
umbrella wedged between the bars of the table, but it flew off like a crazed dirigible, and it took a good thirty seconds before I could catch it as it
swept towards the main road.
We had to sit and eat our picnic without any
protection. One had to hold a bread roll down with the flat of one's hand to
stop said artifact from flying up and away like a startled woodcock. More than once I spread cheese and onion on
the back of my hand rather than on the bread. The coffee, piping hot when
leaving the flask, was scarcely even tepid when reaching frozen lips ten seconds
later.
My brain was cold-addled, too, because
it seemed I could no longer accurately identify the fauna that skimmed through
the skies and scratched for food along the banks of the nearby stream. What I
thought were swallows were in fact sand-martins, and I couldn’t be sure whether
a wheatear I saw was, in fact, a whitethroat, or even a lesser whitethroat, if
there any that frequent that neck of the woods.
As for the partridge with the black eye-stripe, on reading Enid Blyton’s
Illustrated Book of British Birds (very clever alliteration there), it turned
out to be a quail.
At one point, a bonny and tame little
chaffinch (bullfinch?) hopped onto the table, laid its little pink head on one side and
seemed to be saying ‘What in Heaven’s name are you doing here on a day like
this – any chance of any of that bread?
I obliged.
There were
half-a-dozen tables, and, somewhat bizarrely, they were all made of plastic,
rather than good, solid, old-fashioned wood. No doubt a cost-saving brainwave
from some faceless bureaucrat buried deep in Council Headquarters. I noticed
that the surfaces were scorched in parts and had melted until they resembled a relief map of Corsica. I
thought that this was wilful fire-raising by certain terminally bored youth, but I was wrong. I
realised eventually that the less intelligent amongst the picnic-consuming fraternity had
bought those ghastly barbecue trays from Asda and had fired up their barbecues
on the surface of the picnic tables, without putting down a metal sheet or piece of wood as protection, hence their descent into meltdown. Not for the first time, I
wondered at the egregiousness and selfishness of so many people.
Finally, when the wind sucked up and spewed
out the sports section of my newspaper, my temper snapped and I chucked
everything back in the boot, with a vow that our next picnic would be held on
the Cornish Riviera, if I ever chance to reach there.
