July

Many years, it seems, after a fine May and dull June, just as the idea of picnics seems a wash-out, the sun appears and people start moaning about the heat.

I am not a fan of eating outside at the best of times; unless on chairs at a table on the terrace of some restaurant with a view of the Alps and an adjustable sun-shade, it flies in the face of evolution. Certainly, the romanticised English plan – pootling off to a flowery meadow by a clear, lazily flowing stream backed by an inviting wood, with a couple of dressed crabs, a pot of home-made garlic mayonnaise, a mixed salad and a bottle of something fizzy chucked into the insulated cool-box in the boot of the car – is rarely matched by the reality. Nobody washed out the cool-box since that avocado mousse spilt all over the bottom last year, the meadow is full of vast yellow slugs, the stream foams with effluent, the ants and wasps eat more than you do and the wood is surrounded by impassable barbed wire.