Barbecues

When you’re middle class, it’s awkward to complain about anything apart from the weather and queue jumpers. So the idea that barbecues might not be fun must never be mentioned. Moaning about this sunny social institution would take more assertiveness than ever of us will ever possess. The only thing to do is to grin and bear it. To do otherwise is to risk being seen as a killjoy, a wimp and a sap:  the type of person that our cousins from Down Under like to call ‘a whinging pom’.

The irony is that the problem with barbecues is that they are just a bit too Australian. A bit too alpha matey and dependent on good weather to ever really work in the leafy back gardens of middle Britain. For the birkenstock favouring man they are particularly tricky. Before this glowing altar, you are expected to do obeisance to your prehistoric forebears: to strip down and expose your tender white flesh to the sun; to crack open a cold and tasteless beer, to get all hairy about the best way to cook sausages; to make jokes about sausages that you really don’t want your lover to hear lest she or he makes one back.

All too easily the barbecue can become a furnace of fear and shame. And that’s even before we get to the dilemmas it presents. Do you assert your eco credentials by expressing your fears about the non-sustainable origins of the charcoal and the fact that it’s most likely to have been soused in petroleum-based products? Do you show your foody expertise by reminding everyone that barbecue food is generally half-burned (yet still under-cooked) and more than a little unpleasant? Or do you show yourself to be a good sport, put on an apron with a picture of tits on the front, grab the tongs and spend the rest of the day serving up worryingly phallic meat.

The only real way to avoid this pain is the favourite middle class gambit of passive avoidance.  Allow the biggest man to take the tongs from you as soon as possible. Show willing in the early stages by dedicating yourself to serving up Pimms. Make the later stages go easier by dedicating yourself to drinking it. Nod politely if anyone mentions the football. Try not to flinch if anyone calls you mate. Hope against hope that at some stage someone will come along and stack the grill with halloumi and aubergines for baba ganoush. Or that, better still, it might rain. That way you will be back in the safe conversational territory of the bloody awful weather  – and you will be able to take  advantage of the civilising progress humankind has made since the stone age by cooking your food in an oven, inside…