Today

Yesterday it rained for much of the day and evening. Which justified Murphy's Law ("if anything can go wrong it will") because we'd been invited to two barbecues. The first was with our wine circle friends and was in the afternoon. The second was the regular neighbours' gathering in the Close in the evening.

We trotted off to the first one, clutching wine. Somehow the rain held off and we chatted, drank wine and feasted moderately - Paul on barbecued chicken and burgers, me on some very nice stuffed peppers. We made regretful early farewells and went home for the next one. The rain was now looking rather settled and it soon became clear, by some sort of telepathy between neighbours, that the Close BBQ wasn't going to happen.

We also went to a BBQ at Becky's following her non-sky-diving event, two weeks ago. It was very hot and there was a lot of Veggie food on the grill. The next day we went back to Becky's for lunch. We found an unused throwaway BBQ so had grilled sweetcorn and veggie kebabs.

Many pubs round here also have regular BBQ nights throughout the summer so there's never a shortage of charred meat to eat.

In My Day

I don't know who invented the word barbecue, but I'd never heard of it when I was a child. Eating outdoors in the Summer was pretty well always a cold picnic or salads brought out from the kitchen. Mamma would prepare lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers on a plate. Sometimes there was watercress, spring onions or radishes. There was always Heinz salad cream. The lettuces, for many years, would have just been the round variety. They took a deal of cleaning and you could never be confident that there would be no slugs. There might be potato salad and Mamma would add cold meat - corned beef or ham.

If we going on one of our walks, we might take a picnic. This would usually mean sandwiches and some fruit. As I rarely remember ever having good weather on these walks, picnics were often taken sheltering under a dripping tree, fending off spiders and earwigs.

Cooking hot food outdoors in the Summer usually was reserved for Boy Scouts (my brother was one) and meant sausages and beans cooked over a campfire. Very dubious fare, and certainly a boy-thing.

On Guy Fawkes night we always had a huge bonfire (that was one advantage our great big Victorian garden). After the fireworks were over, baking potatoes and roasting chestnuts would be suggested (probably by Chris, who presumably felt the need to demonstrate his scouting expertise). The potatoes would be shoved in the embers (there was always knowledgeable talk of wrapping them in mud which somehow was meant to confer special properties, but we never put this into practice) and chestnuts put onto a shovel. These culinary efforts usually resulted in half-cooked potatoes and fragments of chestnut, all of them tasting very strongly of ash & smoke. Though it tasted vile, it made you feel as though you'd gone back to some primordial roots.

Perhaps that's why it's usually the men that love to do the barbecuing,