Picnics and Sandwiches

So much for such excursions and alarms. While on the subject of holid'ys let's touch on “picnics.”

Who was it who invented the picnic? Was it Julius Caesar when he arranged his first personally-conducted daylight excursion to the shores of Britain, and ate a pickled gherkin under the cliffs of Dover, or was it Noah, who established Henley-on-the-Mount? We know, of course, who was responsible for the national picnic confection which consists of two layers of sand and a piece of mustard held together by two slices of bread, and commonly known as the sandwich. History avers that this quick-lunch accessory was the morbid conception of a noble gentleman who, driven to desperation by the continual toughness of the meat, ordered it to be placed between shock absorbers. Ignoring historical inaccuracies, it remains a fact that picnics without sandwiches would not be picnics.

Apart from the attraction of straining billy-tea through the front teeth, hunting the ham in the sandwich provides the greatest fun at a picnic, and adds the necessary leavening of competition, without which any human gathering is null and void.

Do you remember those old-fashioned picnics in which we participated in our tender youth, when father pushed the pram o'er hill and dale, and mother carried the fruit in a string kit for all the world to see, and a dog flew at Willie and had to be chased by father with a stick; when father page 14 stroked the nose of every horse that poked its head over a fence, and mother said: “You'll do that once too often Alfred,” and all us children thought what a recklessly courageous man was our father. How, when eventually we reached the mud-flats, we all followed father out to sea and searched for pippies. How mother, from the security of her “warren” among the rushes, chanted at two-minute intervals, “Come and get a sandwich, Hector!” and “Hold Winnie's hand, Walter!”

How we all trailed home at sundown like a routed army, with father in the van doggedly pushing the pram, with his shoulders hunched over the handles. How Willie snivelled the whole way home because he had cut his toe and had to carry his boot. How desirable home looked when at last it hove in sight, and how father boiled all the pippies in the big iron pot, and we fell asleep over our plates and had to be carried to bed?

Ah, but those were the days—before the “dodgems” made the centre of the road the direct route to the mortuary. But why resort to retrospection, which is the sleeping partner of Old Age.

January will always be January, and Holid'ys Bear no Date-Stamp.