Davies’s picnic wit is a metaphor in is this advice about sexual mores to an assembly at his daughter’s school: “A girl who thinks love affairs are less trouble than a marriage is probably also the kind of girl who thinks that picnics are simpler than dinner parties. A first-class picnic, which has to be planned to the last detail, but which must also pretend to be wholly impromptu, is a vastly more complicated undertaking than a formal dinner for twenty guests, which moves according to a well-understood pattern. Personally, I have always greatly liked diner-parties, and hated picnics. But then I am a classicist, by temperament, and I think the formality and pattern, either in love or in entertaining, is half the fun.”
See Robertson Davies’s “What Every Girl Should Know,” In One Half of Robertson Davies. New York: Penguin, 1978