Al fresco

In competition No. 2457 you were invited to offer a poem entitled ‘The Picnic’.

The picnics of my youth in Surrey were enjoyable but slightly suburban — Newlands Corner, Chobham Common and so on — but never as suburban as Tony Goldman’s Betjeman-inspired picnic, which ended up with him ‘silent upon a peak in Godalming’. Later I discovered the joys of Pyrenean dingles with secret meadows dotted with natural tables of smooth rock. Nowadays I prefer my tables less natural. Your picnics veered between the halcyon déjeuner sur l’herbe and the sodden disaster. Ray Kelley, Godfrey Bullard and Alanna Blake earn commendations, but the £25 prizes go to the winners printed below, while Basil Ransome-Davies scoops the bonus fiver with his inside job.

Trouble in Roussillon — cold summer sleet —
Rules out the mountain footpaths, so instead
We buy a lush array of things to eat
and hold our picnic on the hotel bed.