Picnic Areas and Picnic Sites

The picnic above took place in southern Uganda in the 1920s five thousand miles from Georgian Britain . . . but this was all the more reason to maintain standards. A silver tea service, bone china and white linen were essential, as were the attendants standing at the ready to pass around the cakes. The children were politely happy with their wooden toys and cloth dolls. In the background is a swampy valley virtually devoid of habitation.

Incidentally, the dog on the right has had a lucky escape. Leopards roamed the hills. One evening, my grandfather had to shoo one away that had put its head around the sitting room door to eye the dog (leopards just love dogs – they could eat a whole one) which was snoozing in front of the fire.

I tried to get a picture from the same spot on a visit to Uganda recently but was thwarted by the houses that have sprung up and their high security walls. If I had been able to capture the same view it would have shown that the swamp has been obliterated by a sizeable town.

The moral is: never assume a picnic spot – or a style of picnic – will be there forever.

We are now four decades on – the early 1960s. The Empire has crumbled and my family are reduced to sitting on a blanket on the ground. However, we seem to be enjoying ourselves in the great outdoors, although have had to simplify now we don’t have the attendants and the silver . . .

And so to 2008: we’ve reached rock bottom in the story of the decline of the picnic. The cutlery is plastic, the food is plastic, and although the view is the wild Ishasha river in southern Uganda with its reverine forest bustling with primates and turacos, its seen through the dusty windscreen of a vehicle. At least she has the door open.

There is a consolation: the only way now, is up. It’s time for a come-back for the 1920s book by Jean Rey: The Whole Art of Dining – Picnic and ‘Al Fresco’ luncheons.

Dr Andrew Sharp, who made the picnic suggestions above and below, is author of THE GHOSTS OF EDEN, a towering epic set in East Africa, to be published by Picnic in April 2009.

The photo below was taken over fifty years ago and shows a Bahima woman from western Uganda sitting next to her milk pots. The staple diet of the Bahima people in those days was milk from the cattle that their lives revolved around. A man might drink up to eight litres a day – that’s about fourteen pints of full cream milk for those of us who still get milk delivered to our doorsteps in glass bottles. The cattle were also bled in order to make a delicious soup. Which is a roundabout way of saying ‘not the usual sort of picnic nosh but wonderful anyway’.

Pictures such as the one above are favourites of coffee table books showing ‘vanishing worlds’ and usually depict white clay and ochre painted bodies, long-shutter photos of dancing by firelight, along with a few naked bosoms. This brings me to my next picnic comment. There are countless reasons why people enjoy picnics, one being bonding with family, friends, neighbours - or indeed strangers. As we all know, what is normal in one culture, may get you arrested in another. With this in mind, the following is worth noting: a friend visited a remote place a long time ago and on meeting the women of the village at the market had her breasts thoroughly palpated to assess her fecundity. See what I mean? Best not to try that in your local supermarket when selecting a bit of the red stuff for that picnic basket . . .

Southern Uganda: The place, in all the world, the author of In Search of Paradise judged most akin to his idea of paradise was an island on a small lake in southern Uganda. Carried over the water in a dug-out canoe, the island appeared ‘through a light opalescent haze. The house was there, beautifully shabby, as though it was a natural part of the island. The green lawns, cropped and velvety, swept down to the water’s edge. It was like seeing a ghost, so faithfully did it tally with my dream picture.’ The island happened to belong to my grandparents who started a leprosy treatment centre on another island – but that’s a different story. I remember the surging strokes of the oarsmen and the rhythmic splash and suck of the paddles when I visited the island as a small child. So I too was entranced, but not just by my grandparents’ island but by the dramatic landscape of volcanoes, lakes and mountains. The eastern arm of the Great Rift Valley is well known – think /Out of Africa, White Mischief/ – but the western limb that divides the savannahs of East Africa from the great forests of the Congo basin is less frequented, but even more spectacular, and was the scene for the search for the source of the Nile by those iron-jawed Victorian explorers. A place to picnic? Perhaps. To stand in awe would be better.

Now, picture yourself under a wide blue sky in the grasslands of East Africa. Sit yourself on some rocky vantage point, feel the warmth of the equatorial sun on the back of your neck and hear the susurrus scratchings of insects in the dry grass. Nearby, you see two young herd boys tending their father’s long-horned cattle. It’s a way of life their ancestors have followed for generations. The boys are playing, twisting strands of grass to make toy cows and bulls, but every now and then they look up and call out the name of one of their charges. The cow raises its head or moos. On the horizon, way beyond the boys, you see a column of dust that marks the passage of a vehicle on a new road. The boys turn to look and you hear them murmuring to each other; you sense the younger boy’s excitement, but the older boy turns away. You can see his eyes. There is fear, as if he has seen a portent.

Soon you’re spirited away just over the horizon to hill country where you find yourself standing on the lawns of a school for missionaries’ children. It’s an idyllic location by a lily-fringed lake. You watch as the children set off on an outing – you overhear that they are going up Crystal Mountain behind the school. A seven year old boy with a beatific face is telling his friend what he will do with the diamond he finds on the summit. When the children have gone, you go and sit on a swing under a pepper tree overlooking the lake. A squall picks up from nowhere, agitates the water and envelopes the mountain. You get goosebumps. The same presage of change that the herd boy feared is coming also to the missionaries’ child. This was half a century ago. Nevertheless, when night is not quite done and the dawn still sleeps, in my dreams I still picnic by that lake . . .

Finally, something that has nothing to do with picnics . . .

I asked the herbalist at this stall at a market in southern Africa what he could recommend. He looked me up and down – with what I realised later was pity – pointed to a jar, and said, ‘This one.’

‘And how will it help me?’

Without hesitation he replied, ‘It’ll make you become a strong man.’

The rest is history.

Andrew Sharp

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