Beware of Mr & Mrs Beach Griller

The smell of a barbecue is a bit like Marmite ... you either love it or hate it.

This time of year is peak “let’s have a barbecue tonight” season, so for those who love burnt chicken legs, overdone sausages and black burgers that’s great – but for others it means summer nights stifling indoors because the neighbour’s barbecue or chiminea (those weird shaped Mexican cooking chimneys) is yet again belching out smoke and fumes across the entire neighbourhood.

Splendid for them but not for you as you rush to get the washing in off the line and hurriedly close all your windows to prevent the house smelling like a late-night kebab shop.

Now one Nuts and Bolter is not a big barbecue fan and his dislike has increased this summer for two reasons.

Last month at the Folkestone airshow he couldn’t believe that on The Leas – where tens of thousands of spectators gathered to watch the action – totally selfish dad chefs sat among the crowds cooking their lunch on disposable barbecues with their obnoxious burger smoke polluting everyone else’s airspace.

And then the following weekend, a walk along the seafront between Folkestone and Hythe, was again spoilt by the pong from a multitude of day-trippers enjoying beach barbecues at everyone else’s expense.

And one of the main problems with disposable barbecues is that Mr & Mrs Beach Griller are so dumb that they forget they take hours to cool down. So when they’ve finished gorging themselves on chicken satays and lumps of steak they can’t take the throwaway barbecue home with them because it’s still too hot. So they either just leave it where it was ignited or bury it in the sand – and then the next day a child or dog running along the beach gets a terrible cut after stepping on the metal edge of the hidden contraption.

So while the Griller family boast about their lovely afternoon eating fresh prawns another family sits in A & E or the vet’s surgery waiting for a badly cut child’s foot or dog’s paw to be stitched up.

And if you’re planning a barbecue this weekend make sure you check out that rather swarthy looking “friend of a friend” who turns up unannounced and uninvited ... for a bite to eat.

Because you never know, it could be Uruguayan footballer Luis Suarez, who’s currently at a bit of a loose end now that he’s been booted out of the World Cup and banned from playing for the next four months.

If Luis turns up then make sure you’ve got shoulder of lamb, or is it man, on the menu. He’s very partial to that, Italian style, and loves nothing better than getting his teeth into a rack of ribs. And if he is there and says: “Tengo mucha hambre (Spanish for ‘I am very hungry’)”, that would be a good time to go fetch a beer from the kitchen.

The pong of the barbecue permeating the sea air is a dead cert at this time of year

Chompion player Suarez