Spring seems to be settling in and that’s great, but I have been recently reminded of one of its worst bits: not hay fever or wrong coat season, but the absolute indignity of alfresco eating.
I usually avoid eating outside; it’s fraught with dangers, from the stress position that is “sitting on picnic blanket” to seagull attack. But last week, giddy with the warm weather and leaving my sordid home office to come to London, my better judgment deserted me. I had one goal: I would treat myself to one of those fancy salad bowls I keep reading about (the “slop” ones that are harbingers of civilisational collapse), sitting in the sun. I wanted to emulate metropolitan sophisticates by paying £12 for elite rabbit food; I wanted improbable amounts of protein and fancy dressing; I wanted vitamin D. You don’t get that in York.
I found a salad bar, queued for ages, made panicky, poor choices and exited with a mountain of expensive roughage. Then the problems really started. Looking for a sunny spot to eat, I realised how inhospitable the urban built environment is to big-salad eaters – in a part of town full of finance bros in Brunello Cucinelli quarter zips and Patagonia vests, there were no tables, no decent benches, no public gardens.
I ended up perched on a wall, oversized cardboard bowl precariously balanced on my knees, trying to wrestle recalcitrant leaves and other ungovernable vegetation in oily dressing into my mouth with a useless wooden fork and the undignified urgency of a seagull swallowing a sausage roll whole. Crispy shallots flew everywhere; tendrils of frisee tried to escape my mouth like a graphic kill scene from a nature documentary. Many, many people witnessed this unedifying spectacle and I caught several pitying glances as I chewed grimly on (and on – kale is an endurance sport). Neither my trousers nor my springtime joie de vivre survived this experiment, so learn from my mistakes: enjoy a nice seasonal salad outside by all means, but first locate a table.
