Baths are good in theory – but horrendous in practice

You then pile in cutlery, plates and drinks sufficient to provide hydration while lying like dying soldiers on a battlefield, the wicker basket now so heavy it can only be lifted by two Romanian weightlifters. You place it all in the back of the car, add a picnic rug and mossie spray – oh, do take lots of mossie spray – and drive five kilometres to the nearest ant’s nest. Upon arrival you discover the wine bottle needs a corkscrew.

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“Oh, I have one at home. In the kitchen. That place we left.”

Sure, picnics look romantic. For instance, there is Manet’s delightful painting Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe, of which I have made many a concerted study. And yet, in my experience, Australian picnics often involve fewer nude women and many more ants.

“OK,” I hear you say, “but life has to involve some unusual eating experience, such as the delight of breakfast in bed.”

Are you kidding? Don’t get me started on breakfast in bed. Hot liquids and toast. That’s breakfast in bed. The first involves a trip to the hospital with second-degree burns; the second involves the importation of crumbs, which will be found in your bed years later.

Even without the burning and the crumbs you’re also propped up at a strange angle, balancing a tray on your lap while trying to navigate a spoonful of egg from tray to mouth, across what were, until this horror began, pleasingly white sheets.

There is a kitchen down the hall. With chairs. A table. There’s a floor from which you can easily sweep stray crumbs. You can eat at the same time as you digest the morning’s news, via paper or device. Somebody could sit opposite you, on their own chair, and offer conversational bons mots.

I’m being negative and I don’t like it. I want to understand these things.

After all, in some things I am the enthusiast, while others play the role of naysayer.

Oysters are a gift. They are pleasure unmatched. That’s my view. Or: they are “snot dressed up as a dining choice”. That’s Jocasta’s view.

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I like cars with gears (most people don’t understand the exquisite pleasure). I enjoy drinking a whole glass of cold milk (weird, I’m told, unless you are five years old). And I prefer watching a TV series I’ve watched before (“But you know what happens?” “Yes, exactly”).

And I really like cooking canned kippers for breakfast, eating them as they are meant to be eaten, on a sturdy kitchen table, the aroma enveloping the house, reaching into every bedroom, while other family members flee for their lives.

I’ll happily explain these enthusiasms, if I can only receive some help from those of you in the other crew – you mysterious humans who enjoy hot baths, picnics and breakfast in bed.