Alfresco fiascos

As I write this, the sun is breaking through the last of the rain and a patch of intense cerulean sky is visible through the parting clouds. It’s turning into a beautiful late spring day and, like a resident of almost any other city in Europe, I’d like to go somewhere nice, sit outside and have my lunch.

This, sadly, I can’t do because, though I believe that the British can hold their own in any culinary showdown, when it comes to eating outside we’re still just rubbish.

We used to be OK at picnics. Back in the days when there was a hamper, a tartan blanket and a Thermos full of paint-stripping tea in the boot of the Humber Snipe, we could sit in lay-bys by the new and empty motorways and brew up on a Primus stove – a uniquely British experience and one we can still look back on with nostalgia.

Today, a picnic will involve one of those soul-destroying platters of canapés from M&S and a fight for a square inch of the local park – every last drop of romance driven out by convenience. If you’re lucky enough to live in the country you can do this with added allergens; if you live by the seaside, with a fine coating of abrasive grit.

We never really got the hang of barbecues. We could have co-opted the slow, smoking habits of the US southern states, but instead decided to grill like Australians. We buy cut-price frozen meat in TV-advertised “deals” because it’s “not worth spending the money” on the good stuff, and then torch it over petrol-soaked “briquettes”. Worse still, we invest a laughably expensive high-tech gas appliance with all the feral, wild-man advantages of dragging the Baby Belling into the garden on an extension hose. It is a depressing thought that all the batterie de cuisine for your next alfresco extravaganza will have come from a petrol station or a hardware hangar.

What we really can’t manage is the pavement-café culture that we were promised as the natural corollary of liberalised drinking laws. If you can find a seat where the local authority has permitted the random strewing of garden furniture across the pavement, a slack-jawed droid will bring your dinner to the kerbside where you can fight off pigeons and vagrants in a miasma of pollution and dog spoor.

Actually, there is a very simple secret to happy outdoor eating in the UK: money. The picnics are great at Glyndebourne. Private members clubs such as Soho House or Century have excellent roof-top terraces with plenty of attentive staff. Hotels like Babington House or the Tresanton maintain really pleasant outdoor eating areas, but none of these is cheap.

Building a terrace, equipping it with something more than garden furniture, providing shade, shelter and sufficient staff is a serious investment. Buying a proper hamper with china and glassware and packing it with worthy food is a costly exercise. All in a country where there is still too little reliably lovely weather to ever make alfresco eating a completely safe bet. So, until global warming really starts to kick in, I think I’m going to continue to eat indoors. I’m not sure I can afford to eat outside.

Tim Hayward is the editor of Fire & Knives; www.fireandknives.com