Picnic 2011

This year the picnic was ‘organised’ by Lizzy (who didn’t actually turn up having gone to Bristol the night before for a booty-call). This being the case, the final organisation was taken over by Peter. It took place on Sunday 12th June, the day after the Treasure Hunt. There was a Danes quarter of Grandsire Caters at 12.30 to start the day off, and then whilst some of us went to Sainsbury’s to buy food, the rest of us hurried to Hyde Park Corner to meet up with the attendees who weren’t in the quarter. I’m sure you will all remember that after giving us such a glorious day for the treasure hunt, the weather decided that the only thing for the picnic was for the rain to hammer it down all day. This did present rather a problem when trying to have a picnic in Hyde Park, and so it was decided that one of the many Imperial Union bars would be a much better place to hold the event. We were lucky enough to find the bar closed and the room empty, and so had the place to ourselves.

Considering fewer than a dozen people actually showed up, there was plenty of food and drink to go round, even with Wood’s frozen scotch-eggs being totally inedible. Jess managed to make up for the loss of the scotch-eggs by making the most amazing gooey cupcakes with loads of icing. They were phenomenal! Despite being an indoor picnic we were lucky enough to have a pigeon grace us with its presence inside the Imperial building. It took quite a few tries, and quite a few members, to shoo the pigeon out of a window before we sat down to eat.

After some debate we decided that indoor cricket/rounders would be a little dangerous and decided to play Guy’s word game instead (everyone writes down a few words on folded bits of paper and puts them into a ‘hat’. The group is split into pairs and take it in turn to take words from the hat. One person describes the word whilst the other person guesses it. For the first round you can describe it with as many words as you like, for the second round you can only use one word, and for the third round you have to mime the word). After a good few rounds of the game we were rudely interrupted by Imperial students wanting to use the bar, and so we packed up and headed to a different bar with slightly better music and nicer beer.

We all decided to call it a day around 19.30 and headed off home. It had thankfully stopped raining for a brief interval and so the journey home wasn’t too bad.

Thank you to everyone that showed up, it was a really enjoyable day.

by Hellen Richardson