The Dullest Blog: comedy ramblings to inspire the most tedious minute of your week

Stephen Callaghan on the Great Picnic of Life.

In my youth, a picnic meant a day where I, along with my parents and my siblings, would be delicately folded into an overheated Volvo to have our inter-family tensions baked at 180 degrees for however long it took us to transport a basket of rancid pastry goods to the side of a river, which would be jam-packed with harmonious middle class families for us to look at and envy whilst we defended ourselves from the two-pronged attack of skin cancer and wasps.

As I got older, the concept of a picnic changed.  Now they are days when cares are forgotten, frisbees flung and booze illegally consumed. Everybody smells of sun-cream and everything is beautiful; the best days of the year.

I call some friends and set off to sunny Kelvingrove for an afternoon of 'research' proudly sponsored by Buckfast.  Then Glasgow, which up to that point of the day had been labouring under the impression that it might be the Costa del Sol, suddenly remembered itself and gently laid down a quilt of dirty grey clouds that it has stubbornly refused to lift ever since.

As I sit in a bus stop enjoying a Scottish picnic; fags and a can of Irn Bru, a number 62 bus drives through a puddle soaking my legs, which have been optimistically short-clad since the start of spring. I can’t help but laugh. Why do I waste so much time waiting for sunny days? (I'm talking metaphorically here, because I'm well deep and stuff.) It’s all too easy to tell myself that I need a certain set of social, financial or emotional weather conditions before I can leave the house and enjoy myself.

But the world is my park and, come rain or shine, out there is where you will find me munching on life's picnic. I will devour the egg sandwich of every day, I will wear the short trousers of joy, I will walk on the grass of knowledge, I will feed the ducks of experience, I will pull up the bluebells of mirth, and photograph the squirrels of wonder.  I might occasionally stand in some of life's Alsatian excrement, but I'll laugh as I scrape it off my metaphorical shoes with a screwdriver of love.

Sorry, the metaphors got a little bit out of control there.  It's late and I've downed the bottle of Buckfast within my soul.