THIS LIFE

I HAVE A FRIEND whose superpower is organising picnics. Other people find themselves on a windy beach, freezing and blinded by sandstorms. She discovers a sunny rock pool, sheltered by a towering crag and with a view of the turquoise Atlantic. Others carry bags full of melting Mars bars and soggy sandwiches. She produces a wicker basket, with separate compartments for quiches and salads and perfectly ripe plums. I’ve known her to serve baba ganoush on a bike ride, and hurl together an Eton Mess by a lake. And if hard boiled eggs are in any way involved, she’ll even bring salt.

Me, I’m more casual. If it’s food, and I’m outside, it’s a picnic. A bag of chips with my back against a sunny brick wall. Peas popped from the pod when I’m working in the garden. Even a bowl of muesli eaten on the doorstep. Actually, doorsteps are great places for picnics. You can sit outside in your PJs, wave at passing neighbours, and nip back into the kitchen to make yourself another cup of tea. And if you write books you can incorporate a day’s work into the picnic process. Breakfast on the doorstep while waiting for the postman. A morning’s work inside at the computer. A wander round the herb patch to add interest to your lunchtime sandwich. A glass of wine before dinner, sipped on a bench by the shed. With several hours work done in the afternoon also. Obviously.

I blame books. Anyone who grew up with Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series remembers Anne, sitting in the sunlit heather, asking, ‘why does food taste better out of doors?’ Ever since I ploughed my way through the whole Blyton canon as a child, I’ve been secretly trying to recreate those deeply indulgent picnics. It’s taken time and effort, but it’s been worth it.

Growing up in 1960s Dublin, my family trips to Glendalough or the Blackrock Baths often included sandwiches. Usually marmite and tomato, and frequently soggy. We tended to travel by bus and end up overtired and ratty. There would be midges. Food would emerge from rucksacks smelling of hot canvas. Tartan rugs had to be carried. The milk for our tea was always off by the time it came out of the medicine bottle and, occasionally, my poor mother would be accused of failing to banish the lingering tastes of calamine lotion or Benylin.

Life was nothing like that for Anne, George, Julian, Dick or Timmy the dog. They’d set off across the lonely moors on bicycles, or stride sturdily along, brandishing sticks, and their meals were taken in the courtyards of ruined castles, or high on precipitous ledges, often behind waterfalls. Those picnics consisted of apples and tins of pineapple, spam and slabs of toffee, and thick ham sandwiches – always referred to as ‘rounds’, which I found weird. There was lashings of ginger beer too, which I’d never tasted. Sometimes – if they weren’t down a mineshaft or stowed away in an aeroplane – they’d have buns or ginger cake made for them by the cook in Kirrin Cottage. Or smuggled out from the kitchen by a jolly maid called Joan. I remember being astonished by the idea of families with smiling cooks and maids in frilly aprons.

Blyton must have had a deep-rooted memory of a particular village, where a little shop served lemonade and homemade macaroons. It keeps cropping up wherever the Famous Five go and in other books as well. Like the rollicking Adventure and Mystery series, and the slightly jaded, later, Five Find Outers. Or perhaps it was I who was jaded by that time. Six macaroons too many. Yet another midnight feast by Malory Towers’ school pool. Fatty, of the Find Outers, with his direct line to the upper-class superintendent and his scorn for the thicko bobby. And Julian, Dick and tomboy George leaving Anne to pick up the litter and wash the plates in a stream. But, despite Blyton’s casual misogyny and class prejudice, visions of those fictional meals still return to enchant me. And Anne’s question continues to be put. Why does food taste so much better out of doors?

Is it the sense of freedom? The fact that picnics suggest summer, and summer suggests long, luxurious days spent eating cake outside sunny cafés or lazing in a hammock with a book? Is it because eating outside stimulates all the senses – that birdsong, bees humming and sunlight slanting through rustling leaves can add a whole new dimension to sandwiches and boiled eggs? Could be. I don’t know. But I’m definitely going to keep doing it. Like so many books read in childhood, the impressions made on my psyche are too deep to be removed.

And, like so many readers, I’ve found some of my memories of favourite books aren’t, in fact, correct. You know that ‘lashings of ginger beer’ quote? It’s a line from the 1982 film, Five Go Mad in Dorset. Not one of Blyton’s. She never wrote it. But I do think she might approve.

Anyone who grew up with Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series remembers Anne, sitting in the sunlit heather, asking, ‘why does food taste better out of doors?’