Pier Pressure
It’s not very often that I feel compelled to completely spill the proverbial beans about what I’ve done in a day, because most of it is dreary and awful, like the puns (or indeed, palindromes) I use for my unimaginative and hackneyed titles.
As others may exclaim, bright-eyed and breathlessly, we had gone punting down the River C— once again, after overcoming a rational and rather terrifying fear of capsizing (albeit in less than frigid, and knee-deep waters), and that to heighten the experience and the sensations of frivolously whiling away a cloudy afternoon, we had decided to bring along a, as they say, picnic of sorts, not just a bunch of Snickers bars and cheap sodas but actual sandwiches, crisps, tea, and water, altogether a diet more befitting of the undoubtedly refined and cultured activity-goers that we would become.
Naturally, we were looking forward to such an experience, no doubt a singular one that seemed to signal our integration into the customs of our adopted country but also one that its own kind were fleeing away from in favour of rowdy evenings of frothy beers and too much cheap, vile whiskey, but it might also have been an odd image stuck in our heads after reading so many imported storybooks in our impressionable and formative years, that picnics were a fantastic and desirable afternoon pursuit, just like organising a stamp collection of a rare and unique menagerie of authentic Rhodesian stamps or making likenesses of famous world-leaders out of string and digestive biscuits, or even writing unnecessarily long and meaningless sentences in the style of Proust translators who enjoy or even relish churning out treacle-like prose; indeed, we lead the world in plumbing the depths of hobbies that people look on with a mixed sense of antipathy at the collapse of the human condition and morbid fascination.
Pausing to catch my breath (be it from actually unbrokenly typing that out or from trying to daub weeks-old butter onto bread only slightly thicker than an English student's work-file) I realised we had assembled a buffet that would not have been out of place in a Victorian tea-room (except that egg mayonnaise sandwiches did not require for an army of maidservants and peons working their fingers to the bone, endlessly buttering, boiling and peeling and chopping eggs until they cried for their homelands) and then I wondered how the hell we had learnt about all this and how the hell I could even think it would be so natural for women wearing wallpaper-like dresses and britches to be eating our kind of lunch, packed into Tupper wares, plastic bags and stainless steel Thermoses, much like putting a collection of WW I postcards into gaily pink coloured plastic clip-files with Hello Kitty motifs on them.
Soon enough we had carted everything onto the boat, and set off, veering and bumping but most of all eating and shielding our cups, trying to reduce the river-water content of our tea, due to my obvious inadequacies at punting. While supposed to make me feel like an ultra-bourgeois member of society that an anarchist would not hesitate to shoot, I felt it rather to be more well-described by those pint-sized soaps or pretzels that they (at least used to) hand out on planes, well-intentioned but obviously inferior betrayals of the original. The connotation of this is obvious enough, and while I did savour my chicken-and-bacon-and-sweetcorn sandwiches I doubt I would want a repeat performance of such an act for, like most attempts to replicate the past that fail because the, for want of a better word, zeitgeist is absent, we can only replicate the form and not the spirit (and not a very good form at that).
Unless, of course there are cucumber sandwiches on lace doilies; but then that would be more a parody than anything else good-intentioned.
