In Our Time of Covid, people who cannot bear to be separated from their closest friends — and face it, that means anyone who isn’t a sociopath — have turned to outdoor ways of socialising.

One of these is the picnic. The French, although they did not invent the croissant — that credit goes to the Hungarians, a story for another day — were allegedly the first nation to have picnics. One could argue that history records many a pre-French picnic (apples in Eden; manna in the wilderness; Omar Khayyam’s jugs of wine et cetera), but the French were the first to give this a name: le pique nique. I’m not being facetious, that really is what it was called and how it was spelled. Not spelt: that is a grain dear to gluten-intolerant bread lovers...