Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003)

Ali’s family picnic is outwardly happy but inwardly troubled. After twenty years, Nazneen’s marriage to Chanu Ahmed has gone wobbly. She’s never loved Chanu, but at the time of the picnic, she’s conflicted by guilt and lust-fueled by Karim, a Muslim political activist...

Sean Walsh’s Bloom (2003)

Some aficionados of Ulysses remember the picnic at which Molly, then Marian Tweedy, seduced Leopold Bloom at a picnic at Howth Head around 1888. The lovers traveled to the outskirts of Dublin, where they made love among the wild rhododendrons and ferns. It is a...

Alexander Payne’s Sideways (2004)

Payne’s film Sideways has three picnic episodes, none of which are in Rex Pickett’s novel Sideways. The picnic first is Miles Raymond’s memory of a vineyard, wine, and food. He recalls that he and his ex-wife used to like this view. “Once,...

Nigel Slater’s Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunget (2004)

Slater’s picnic in the family backyard is a metaphor for his homosexuality and his conflicted relationship with his father, who wants him to be masculine. Tinned Ham” is humorous up to a point, but the picnic menu can make you gag. Slater describes a...

Martin Booth’s A Very Private Gentleman (2004)

Question: What does an obsessive gunsmith take to a picnic on the grass? Answer: cold bottles of Frascati and Asprinio, five grams of pecorino, 100 grams of prosciutto, a jar of small black olives, two oranges, a thermos of sweet black coffee, a loaf of coarse bread,...

Amanda Hesser’s Cooking for Mr. Latte (2004)

Hesser’s “Fine Dining in the Sky,” from Cooking for Mr. Latte, A Food is a fussy gourmet’s admission that she packs a bulky in-flight bag as if it was a flying coach a picnic cooler. She wants us to believe that she for a flight to Spain, she...

Marc Forster’s Finding Neverland (2004)

Whether or not Barry and the Llewellyn Davis family picnicked in Kensington Park (or any park) is moot. Assuming they did, Forster’s Finding Neverland, with a screenplay by David Magee, fictionalizes three picnics that mark significant moments in Barrie’s...

Alexander Payne’s Sideways (2004)

Sideways is a slice of life in Miles Raymond’s midlife crisis. Rex Pickett’s novel and Payne’s film fail to distinguish whether Miles is a sad sack or a creep. Though there aren’t any picnics in Rex Pickett’s novel, Payne invented three...

Charles Dance’s Ladies in Lavender (2004)

Locke’s story “Ladies in Lavender” does not have a picnic. Dance thought better and wrote a beach picnic on the coast of Cornwall into his screenplay. The story is simple. Ursula and Janet, spinster sisters, well on in years, live in a cottage by the sea near the...

Judith Martin’s Miss Manners’ Guide (2005)

Martin’s advice (always with humor) for picnics is the chapter for “Outdoor Eating.” Here it is: It is true that some rules for eating outdoors are different from those that apply indoors. For example, it is permissible to execute extraneous wildlife found crawling...