Picnic Day

What this is

Eating something good outdoors with people you actually like. That's the whole brief. 18 June is the date the internet settled on; the rest is up to you, the weather, and how much wine you brought.

Worth knowing

• Pique-nique showed up in French print in 1692 — back then an indoor dinner party where each guest brought a dish. The blanket-on-grass version came after the 1789 revolution opened the royal parks.
• Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863) got rejected from the official Paris Salon for putting a fully nude woman into a picnic scene with two clothed men. Modern art started there.
• Largest picnic on record: Lisbon, 20 June 2009. 22,232 people on the Tagus. Guinness, still standing.
• The Pan-European Picnic of August 1989 helped end the Cold War. About 600 East Germans walked through a peace picnic at the Hungarian-Austrian border. Hungarian guards didn't intervene; the Berlin Wall fell three months later.
• Glyndebourne, the English country-house opera (since 1934), schedules a 90-minute interval mid-opera so black-tie audiences can eat hampers on the lawn. Only major opera festival in the world built around picnicking.

Pack list

• A basket. Fortnum & Mason wicker for ceremony, an Italian cesto with closed straps for hills, a Japanese furoshiki cloth for travelling light, a Yeti soft hamper if function beats nostalgia.
• A blanket. Wool tartan (Tweedmill, Pendleton), Faribault Mill camp blanket, waxed cotton for damp grass. Skip synthetic fleece — it grabs grass like Velcro.
• A flask. Stanley Classic (since 1913), Zojirushi for tea, Klean Kanteen for cold rosé. Plus a bottle carrier (Brouk & Co. leather, Picnic Time canvas) so the wine arrives cold.
• One specific food. A wedge of Comté, Manchego or Parmigiano with a knife. Fig jam or quince paste. A tin of Spanish anchovies. Smoked Polish sausage. Same-morning sourdough.
• A game. Pétanque set in a leather case (Obut, the French standard), Kubb the Swedish lawn game, a worn-in deck of cards, a phone-sized Bluetooth speaker, a small watercolour kit and pad.
• A reservation. Vineyard hamper tour at a named estate, lawn tickets to Glyndebourne or a local outdoor concert, a reserved riverbank spot at sunset hour, a one-day catered picnic in the recipient's nearest large park.