The Curse of Summer

There have been two days of unseasonably warm weather here in southern England. Apparently it’s been warmer than in the south of France, Spain and North Africa. Well, bully for us! Hopefully it will break tomorrow and we'll be back to rain and icy winds - it is spring, after all.

Now some of you may be wondering (or not - as if I care), why I should be so reluctant to embrace a period of sunshine and warmth. The answer is simple - my neighbour owns a barbecue. Admittedly he’s not yet removed it from whatever hellhole he winters it in. But he will – I can feel it in my water.

What is it about the human race and barbecues? Why, given that the vast majority of people in the developed world own some sort of stove, do they insist on cooking outside as soon as the temperature gets anywhere above freezing? They have doubtless installed their stove in a kitchen. They may have even fitted it up with an extractor fan and bought themselves a selection of suitable cooking utensils and appliances. Perhaps the walls are tiled in tasteful representations of common vegetables and spices. Strings of garlic and onions droop down from false oak beams. A pair of blue-striped aprons ,marked His and Hers hang from a rustic hook on the back of a cupboard door.

So why, then, do they abandon these paradises of the culinary arts to go outside and cook (I use the word loosely) on a device whose sole purpose is to simultaneously cremate and undercook perfectly good sausages?

Barbecues smoke, they smell and their presence encourages loud, unpleasant, drunken people to stand around for hours – they have no choice because barbecued food needs to be cooked for about a fortnight before being even barely edible. These starving masses take their minds off the gastronomic gut bashing to come by talking about golf, football, cars, that miserable so-and-so next door (yes, I heard!) or any of the other inanities that the undernourished brain dwells upon.

Barbecues are the curse of civilisation, as we know it. There is no such thing as a good barbecue, even, Lee, in Australia, the spiritual home of the barbie. They should be broken up, melted down and refashioned to emerge, reborn, as garlic presses, zesters, those little things for making melon balls, or something even more useless, just anything but outdoor incinerators.

Now I think I’ll go and set the oven to 175 degrees Centigrade, pop in a beef and stilton pie and rest easy in the knowledge that, in twenty-five minutes time, it will be perfectly cooked. Time to nip out into the garden with a cold beer so that I can smell the scents of nature wafting on the breeze and listen to the birds sing.

While I still can.

Thinking of nature and redundant metal objects, here's a blue flower and a piece of rusting railway track.