A Picnic Adds Taste to Visual Feasts

It wasn’t always called the White Tower, that 100-foot-high bulwark at the heart of the Tower of London. The name took hold only in 1241, when Henry III whitewashed the original stones, which had come from Kent and Caen back in 1077 at the order of William the Conqueror.

Or so I am told.

What I know for sure is that the tower is a formidable backdrop for a picnic.

I sat there, on a bench by the River Thames, and unwrapped the foil from a jacket potato that I’d bought from a cart beside Tower Bridge.

The vendor offered dozens of toppings, including chili and onions; I asked for grated cheddar cheese and fresh chives. The potato was crisp on the outside, flaky on the inside and so hot that the golden cheese melted.

A beefeater guard walked by on his break. The Crown Jewels were locked up behind. Pink-cheeked youngsters toddled after pigeons. Nannies toddled after youngsters. The moat was wide and green.

There was no mistaking where I was.

Reinforcing Reality

A picnic, somehow, is like pinching yourself to prove you are there. It slows you down just enough to reinforce reality. It adds the sense of taste to visual wonders. It places you on the scene, instead of isolating you behind bus windows or the perspiring glass of an air-conditioned restaurant.

Whether in city or country, a picnic allows the day to flow on, its mood and rhythm unbroken by the search for an eatery or a long wait for service.

For me a picnic menu is incidental, though not unimportant. It is the setting that glimmers long after the cheese and the bread have disappeared.

Spontaneous picnics are best. They are a sudden gift to yourself and your friends.

I have skipped a midday meal--even a prepaid one--to stay outside on a brisk, sunny Sunday in Stockholm’s Old Town.

I have excused myself from a scheduled tour lunch in Budapest to catch a snack at the city zoo.

I have pulled my rental car off lonely roads during rain squalls in Scotland and picnicked behind locked doors--while being splendidly frightened by BBC mystery tales on the radio.

One summer I left Dubrovnik by van with six friends, driving up the ragged Dalmatian coast of Yugoslavia. The day was fresh and clear; fist-shaped clouds boxed their way across a blue horizon.

Split was our destination, but unanimous was our vote to skip a hotel dining room scene at noon. Our time was too short; our diets had been too heavy. We paused at a village market--not far from Hvar--and pointed to olives, cheese, bread, wine and figs. With Swiss Army knives at the ready, we picnicked amid white boulders on a cliff high above the Adriatic.

One of my favorite picnics happened because of a funeral in the Portuguese village of Sintra. The procession filled the narrow street with mourners who walked behind a canary-yellow Ford Cabriolet that had been made into a hearse with tassels and filigree.

We could not move our car from the curb. So we watched for a while and then began buying fresh bread, slabs of Serpa and Flamenco cheese and a bottle of vinho verde in its tall green bottle.

By then the procession had passed, and we drove into the countryside to a field crimson with poppies. We sprawled beneath groaning white windmills and drank a toast to life.

The next day, near Obidos, we took the empty bottle into a country store for a refill. The proprietor walked past barrels of white wine and rose, then tapped the vinho verde. From a drawer of odd corks he cut one to fit and pushed it into the bottle.

Another magical time was in a glade above the walled village of Riquewihr south of Strasbourg. We had been traveling by barge on the canals of Alsace and Lorraine; it felt good to commune with the earth.

The young French chef sent us off with hampers of melons, bean salad, quiche Lorraine, chocolate tarts and Alsatian wines. But for a gathering of rain clouds, we might have stayed until dark.

Some of the ingredients of a picnic in France are present in French Polynesia. Rather than dine at a hotel on the island of Moorea we stopped at a roadside market for fresh baguettes, goat cheese with herbs, taro chips and Tahitian Hinano beer.

Then, traveling slowly by motor scooter, we began searching for a perfect beach. It was not far away, a shallow cup of white sand that faced the lagoon and was shaded by Australian pines. A tree stump would serve as a table. A small stone bench would allow us to sit above the sand.

As we left, I looked for a sign so that I could identify this romantic place. A small placard was tacked to a tree: “Propriete Prive. Tabu.”

I respect private property as much as I love picnics, so I am glad I ate first and read later.