Island Picnic

I can't say I've ever been a big fan of picnics - not the conventional kind, anyway. The usual kind of picnic is where you fuss about for hours packing lots of different kinds of food in some kind of big bag, and then you drive to a beauty spot and either sit by the car and eat it or carry it for half a mile until you get fed up with it. Then you unpack it all, and it takes ages and you all have to have a little plastic plate and a plastic cup full of warm orange juice or cool coffee, and the ground is wet so you have to sit on a rug and there's not quite enough room and everything is covered in either sand or wasps or both. Then you pack it all up again and drag it all back to the car.

A couple of weeks ago, on Caldey Island, however, we managed to achieve the perfect picnic.


We bought some food from the cafe in the middle of the island, and brought our own bottles of water with us. The cafe's food is perhaps on the unimaginative side - a ham sandwich is BREAD and BUTTER and HAM and THAT'S IT - but at least it doesn't cost a fiver and contain half a tub of mayonnaise and twelve other ingredients that don't go with ham.


So, sandwiches. Caldey Island chocolate, made on the island by Cistercian monks. Bottles of water. We put it all in rucksacks, walked across the island, strayed ten minutes from the usual paths and we found this:

Gorgeous, springy grass. Blue sky. Nobody about. And, if you stood up, this was the view:

No wasps. Seals in the sea below. Bit of a sleep after lunch on the springy grass (yes, admittedly, face rather red from the sun by the evening).

I've always loved small islands - to me, they still have that Swallows-and-Amazons feel to them. I could grow to like picnics too.