Poems about picnics

In Competition No. 3155 you were invited to supply a poem entitled ‘The Picnic’.

This challenge was prompted by a tweet from picnic-hater @edcumming inviting people to nominate their single worst picnic item. Suggestions included stale warm dry carrot batons, hummus with a skin, supermarket Scotch eggs and gin in a tin that’s been slowly boiled by the sun. So as we face a summer of outdoor socialising, should we all just face the fact that picnics are much nicer in the imagining?

There are clearly fans out there, judging by the entry, which was large and tremendous. The winners, especially tricky to choose this week, take £25 each.

Oh look! Another glossy supplementbabbling away about how meals al frescoare easy — only half an hour well spentand there’s your picnic! Oh, hey-bloody-presto! What Austen slyly dubbed ‘the apparatusof happiness’ (such irony!) is there:plates, napkins and, to magnify your status,a ziggurat of matching Tupperware. This