Nostalgia strikes with a tartan rug and a methylated spirit stove
‘DA, what are those people doing?’ It is early in the summer of 2020. The day is a day of fine weather and slowly lifting lockdown. The time late is early afternoon. The place is a car park close to a lake where people have arrived in goodly number to enjoy the tonic of fresh air after weeks cooped up at home. Runners are contorting themselves in intricate stretching routines. Children are bursting with joyous noisy energy. There’s a middle-aged man in lycra over in the corner briskly pumping up the tyres of his bike and adjusting his helmet. Dogs are frisky. Couples young and old are holding hands. Family groups are calling in the woodland. An energetic pair of rubber-suited teenagers are carrying a bright yellow canoe towards the gleaming water, their giddy shrieks of pain at tip-toeing over sharp pebbles in bare feet mixed with the laughter of liberation.
The air, the atmosphere, the occasion is as though the cork has been popped from a bottle of champagne. Breathe it in and feel exhilarated, energised, enlivened. And in the middle of all this light-headedness are ‘ those people’ spotted by young Persephone sitting on a small embankment. What, indeed, are they doing?
There are three of them, all three female, assorted ages. They are sitting, yes, but not sitting on chairs. A large rug has been spread across their chosen patch of grass so they are sitting on the rug. I note with some amazement that the rug is a Foxford, made from wool with a vaguely tartan pattern. The three ladies (I feel I must call them ladies since they have a Foxford rug) somehow exude elegant calm in the midst of the cheerful, tipsy, unleashed humanity whirling around them. In the centre of the rug is a large Thermos flask and the ladies are sipping tea from china cups as they converse. A selection of sandwiches and a plateful of brack, buttered brack, are on display.
‘Persephone, have you ever heard of such a thing as a picnic?’ ‘I think maybe I read about one once, Da, in an Enid Blyton novel maybe.’
‘Well, dearest daughter, now you can say that you have not only read about a picnic but you have also seen one with your own two eyes...’
The sight of the three ladies puts me in mind of my childhood in the sixties when the Medders family owned a tartan patterned rug and range of picnic equipment. We were lucky to have a car, which father took on the road Monday to Friday working as a sales representative for a chemical company. At weekends, however, the car was loaded up with fishing nets, buckets, spades, tennis balls and the picnic gear to take us all on expeditions to beaches and hillsides and riverbanks all over Ireland.
Let’s get this straight. One. It is not a proper picnic if participants have a table or seats. The only exception to this rule is that elderly grandparents may be allowed the comfort of a deck-chair. Everyone else is at ground level. Mandatory. Two. A barbecue is emphatically not the same thing as a picnic. A barbecue entails cooking while a picnic is more a salad and sandwich affair. Three. Preparation is the key to a good picnic. My late mother put almost as much effort into having everything in order on the outdoor catering front for our family expeditions as she put into Christmas dinner.
The advent of Tupperware made her job of having sandwiches ready to serve in good condition much easier, of course. Mother was also a dab hand at baking the brack, which she sliced and buttered in advance. Though cooking food was not contemplated, we did have a little stove on which to boil a kettle. The smell of the methylated spirits used as fuel in the stove remains with me still more than half a century later.
I inherited the tartan rug and some sentimental soul gave us a wicker-basket picnic set as a wedding present. Both have been relegated to the attic. We live in an era where children expect to be taken to McDonalds rather than being obliged to eat sandwiches laced with sand at some seaside beauty spot. So they will surely never experience the satisfaction of lighting a methylated spirit stove in drizzle driven by a force five breeze.