A while back now, Hels wrote a post about the history of picnics and it made me think about the picnics in my life.
I don't remember family picnics at all. On weekends, my parents were always entirely bound to the house so we ate at the table, the same as we did every other day. I suspect the idea of packing up food and going somewhere else was all too much work for mum to want to bother with and in many ways i felt the same when I had a house full of people. Cook, pack up, find a destination, eat in an inconvenient location then pack it all up and go home to wash up. Those picnics are not for me but I'm happy to take a bunch of snacks and eat outdoors. Or, as I did one day recently, take my own sandwich and meet up with friends in a park, buying coffee nearby.
What we did quite a bit of when I was a child, was church picnics and the very specific Sunday School picnics. It was common place for our church to declare a "Church Picnic" for one or two of the public holidays each year. A park would be chosen and anyone interested would come along with their picnic chairs, cold meats, canned vegetables, home made slices and cakes, balls, bats and bikes.
Everyone would get set up in a single, ever growing circle. There would be chatting and silliness, people would pass around their cakes and there would likely be sunburn.
I can't remember what mum took but I know that I was always jealous of other people's food. Pretty much any biscuit from a packet seemed more enchanting, prettier, more perfect than mum's home made things (which of course were superior but try telling that to a kid who was entranced by the perfection of machine made)
The Sunday School picnic, now I think of it, seemed to really hark back to different times. Any kid who attended Sunday School at all was invited to the annual event. We all scrambled onto a bus to a park, usually with a beach, and the ritual picnic would be on. There were games and races, swimming and of course the food. Sunday School picnics had the same menu every year: sandwiches made by some of the older church ladies, ice creams on sticks which were transported on magical dry ice, jugs of cordial, cream buns and watermelon.
By the mid-eighties somebody had decided swimming was too hard to supervise and keep safe so on this particular, very hot day, there was no swimming (was there even a water course? I don't remember)
I was about 13 or 14, the park was a dustbowl, we were hot and at a slightly loose end, probably waiting for the next treat to make an appearance and someone started a water fight. I don't remember what we used to carry the water in but we must have had something because very soon we were all taking turns filling containers at the tap and throwing water at each other.
One parent who was known to be very strict indeed, lost the plot about his daughter's lack of decorum and the water fight was shut down. My mother talks about it to this day.
The daughter went on to have an unplanned pregnancy within a few years. The family had moved away by then but by all accounts, the dad was a changed man under the influence of a grand baby.
As I write about it, I am awestruck by the risk taken, the work load involved and the commitment of people who worked their butts off for us kids to take it all for granted.
I never became much of a picnic person, as I mentioned earlier, but for a period of time I had a small picnic-ish tradition with my own kids. We would spend school holidays going on little jaunts into the countryside. I would take haloumi cheese and cabanossi and bread rolls and drink and we would find a public barbecue, cook up the cheese and cabanossi, picking it off the barbecue like hors d'oeuvres before sitting at an adjacent table and having a slapped together lunch served off paper towel. All I had to wash up when I got home was a knife and a pair of tongs.
Good days.
