Lady Glenconner’s Picnic Papers by Anne Glenconner (Bedford Square £10.99, 304pp)
Lady Glenconner’s Picnic Papers are available now from the Mail Bookshop
You might expect a picnic with a princess to be a glittering affair where you wash down caviar sandwiches with glass after glass of champagne, all
in the shade of some great palace. However, if your royal hostess was Princess Margaret, you were more likely to find yourself wincing as you politely tried to swallow her picnic favourite: avocado soup.
Lady Glenconner, former lady in waiting to the princess and self-described ‘dedicated picnicker’, has compiled this delightful book celebrating the very British obsession with picnicking. The contributors, all friends stretching from royalty to TV stars, each share a picnic tale, and the occasional recipe to add to Lady Glenconner’s hamper.
Lady Glenconner’s life, as revealed in her fabulous memoir Lady In Waiting, has been stuffed with enough glamour, grandeur and tragedy to rival even the most dramatic episode of Downton Abbey. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that she has collected such an extraordinary list of friends in her 92 years.
Most of the picnicdotes are a far cry from the rest of us eating pork pies and drinking warm prosecco in one’s local park.
Colin Tennant, husband of Lady Glenconner, also shared his wife’s fanaticism for al fresco dining. Once at Glen (their Scottish country estate) he arranged a picnic at the loch for his eccentric uncle, Stephan Tennant, who thought the colour of heather vulgar.
The only solution for such a problem was, of course, to organise hundreds of blue paper flowers to be stuck on the hill to mask the offending purple. ‘So much better, darling boy’ was the thanks from his uncle.
Princess Margaret wouldn’t picnic without her butler and, even then, thought that a proper picnic should be eaten indoors while seated at a chair. I would have thought this was called ‘eating a meal’ but who am I to question her royal highness?
Not quite fit for a princess: Princess Margaret’s favourite picnic food was avocado soup
Peculiar tastes are rife in the upper echelons and Lady Glenconner shows that the greatest way to understand the eccentricities of the upper class is by glimpsing into their hampers. A staple feature of picnics provided by Princess Margaret’s friend Angela Huth? Strawberry and chicken soup. No thanks!
However, it’s not just titled folk who share their picnic secrets with us. Graham Norton reveals that he too remembers picnics as an indoors affair, albeit sat in a car in Ireland rather than the Banqueting House of Hampton Court.
His father would say all that was needed was a patch of blue sky ‘big enough for a pair of sailor’s trousers’ and if you could see at least one tree, your meal would be transformed into a picnic.
There are tips on picnicking while airborne, what to do when eating with a maharajah and how to wash up your dishes (all good picnics are served on china plates) if you find yourself stuck in the Sahara.
From Hampton Court to the Himalayas and from Mick Jagger to Winston Churchill, this book is a movable feast of delightful anecdotes.
If you want to discover what the great and the good are like at their most relaxed, then look no further than the Picnic Papers. Essential for every picnic hamper this summer.
