Matt Heath: Picnics are sexier today than they have been

A week ago Aucklanders were given the go-ahead to interact outside with a small amount of other masked people. Photo / File

Picnics are sexier today than they have been since France's late-18th-century Reign of Terror.

A week ago, Aucklanders were given the go-ahead to interact outside with a small number of other masked people. It's led to frenzied picnic talk across traditional and social media. Like most New Zealanders, I love eating a bachelor's handbag, some white death and a bacon and egg pie (no peas) on the grass.

A bachelor's handbag being a cooked supermarket chicken, white death being a six-pack of buns and the grass being somewhere nice to sit down. There is no doubt picnics have improved level 3 lockdown. It's still crushingly depressing - just slightly less so.

As a species, we have eaten outside for most of our evolution. However, sucking on a rotten gazelle leg on the hard Sahara turf was far from a picnic. The modern concept of a picnic didn't reach the general population until 231 years ago. A large crowd of female protesters assembled at the Parisian markets to protest the price of food.

Rampant spending by Louis XVI combined with failed crops had collapsed the economy and made bread hard to come by. After getting no response from city officials, the women stormed the palace, killed dozens of guards and demanded the king come down, join the people and stop being such an elitist toff. A terrified Louis XVI conceded to their demands but later tried to escape dressed as a poor person. His plan was never going to work. The king's face was on every coin in the country, and being the most pampered human ever to live, he failed to look, walk or talk like a normal person. He was immediately captured, and before you know it, France had entered the Reign of Terror.

Louis, his wife and 40,000 other nobles had their heads nipped off by guillotine. These bloody decapitations were a boon for outdoor eating. The king was gone, and his magnificent royal parks were opened to the public for the first time. The people of Paris grabbed baskets, filled them with food and wine and laid blankets down. In the sun on the royal lawns, they ate and drank to their heart's content. They dubbed this new activity "pique-nique" - a term that had, up till that point, described bringing your own booze to a restaurant.

Pique-niques were so much fun they spread to England and America, where the name was shortened to picnic. Then, last week, on October 3, 2021, a mere 18,974km from the site of the first pique-nique, the ruler of New Zealand announced that the people would once again be allowed to meet outside. They would be permitted to pique-nique briefly as long as it was with another household who remained two metres away with their faces covered. Freedom!

The picnic is back and, to celebrate, listeners of the Matt and Jerry Breakfast Show on Radio Hauraki asked: "What are the four pillars of a Kiwi picnic?" What are the four quintessential aspects of dining outside in New Zealand?

The results disappointed everyone involved. After 1100 votes, listeners decided the four pillars were a blanket, bacon and egg pie, a box of beers and being buzzed by a wasp. A terrible result. What about baskets, wine and bachelor's handbags?

Surely a picnic needs a bag of chips, raro in a portable jug, triangular egg sandwiches and someone else's dog trying to steal your food. The survey results should have been met with calls to once again fire up the guillotines for everyone involved. Unfortunately, that isn't allowed in any of the upcoming 1000 level 3 phases.

In conclusion, picnics have enjoyed a long and storied history and now, thanks to a very slight relaxation of covid restrictions, they are back and worse than ever.

Viva la pique-nique.