WOULD YOU LIKE TO COME TO A BARBECUE?

Would you like to come to the worst variety of social event???

IT’S BARBECUE SEASON!!! WOULD YOU LIKE TO COME TO A BARBECUE??

Would you like to come to the worst variety of social event?

Would you like to come and be too hot for 4-5 hours and get incredibly stressed out because the sun is shining in your face and you’re dizzy and sweaty and you can’t see and you can’t sit down because there isn’t really anywhere to sit?

NOW THAT WE HAVE THAT ESTABLISHED: How would you feel about a plate of the worst type of food? Yes, it’s just meat and bread. No, we haven’t done anything with it, it’s just plain. Would you like some undercooked yet somehow also burnt pieces of unseasoned, plain meat, with NO sauce and NO gravy? You can try to assemble it into something appetising but you WILL drop things down your front and onto the ground.

People say they love barbecue food, and I will allow some types of regional barbecue are adequate, but those people clearly haven’t been to a white person’s barbecue on some horrible poxy rectangle of grass as the sound of the nearest motorway rumbles in the background and the child from next door throws stones at you over the fence while sniggering.

Oh, you don’t want your meat plain, you WOULD like some sauce? Well, there’s only ketchup (the worst sauce, a red sugar plastic, a disgrace to the good name tomato) or some sort of ghost pepper hot sauce that some guy called Dave who wears a bandana brought along. Everybody loves Dave! He’s wacky!

Oh, but you’re vegetarian? Hope you love Linda McCartney and half-raw portobello mushrooms! You’re gluten free? Bad luck, all the food options are encased in a big bread bun. Still, if you’d like you can help yourself to our curated array of fizzy houmous, some kind of sweaty cheese that doesn’t have a knife to cut it, and the inevitable slimed-up little pond of olives that everyone’s had their sweaty fingers in. Oh, and here’s a wasp. Here’s a wasp now.

By the way you’re going to eat this off a paper plate and you’re going to have to try to balance your food on it while you stand up.

Or you’re going to eat this off a paper plate while you sit on a bit of gravelly grass that will imprint into your thigh.

Those are your options! No you CAN’T sit inside at the table like a human being with manners. It would be impolite.

The smoke is in your face! The smoke and also the flies are in your face! Someone is vaping, I hope you enjoy “Watermelon Glow” drifting into your mouth at the same time as the chicken wings which you don’t like but are trying to eat and which are getting honeyed-up sauce glaze all over your fingers and under your nails. The wasp, here he is again. He never left.

We’re so glad you came out, we haven’t seen you in ages!!! Do you remember Rachel? There are lots of people here and most of them you barely know or don’t know at all or perhaps have met once, at a houseparty 5 or 10 years ago. You’ll forget you’ve met them, but they’ll remember you, and this will soon become apparent and embarrassing to everyone concerned. Also all these people will be talking at once and you will be expected to try and do it back. Hey could you pass me a beer from the big horrible plastic bucket full of melting ice? Would you like one? How do you know Dave? Would you like some tinny little music played from a man’s phone that he would like to tell you about? This year probably he is really into Geese. Now you’re in a discussion with “Rachel” and she’s asking you what you do for a living even though she doesn’t care and you don’t care. Now someone has a guitar.

If you go inside to sit down on your own even for five minutes people will think you a FREAK. You will have to go and hide in the toilet but then you will be aware that people are queueing outside the toilet.

The man will be here too, the one who is always at The Barbecue: the one who loves to grill and will stand next to the fire poking the meat items with a utensil. Sometimes this man will be of the standard variety who views cooking over fire as inherently more masculine and will loudly proclaim that he doesn’t normally cook much but there’s just something about an open flame. Sometimes this man will be of the post-modern variety who is aware of the former and makes an ironic remark about not wanting to be seen as one of Those Guys. But the food will come out the same either way, and neither of these guys will remember to turn over the veggie skewers that are on the grill at the same time as the meat items they are so fastidiously shepherding.

It’s too hot it’s too hot it’s too hot. What a great thing to do, to wait for the hot day, the hottest day, and then stand right next to a fire and cook hot food while hot air billows around you and out of people’s mouths.

The wasp is back.

Don’t get me started on picnics.