Easter Monday Barbecue

On Monday afternoon, I discovered what everybody in Milan does if they can't get out of the city does on a sunny bank holiday Monday: they have a barbecue at the Bosco in Città.

The Bosco in Città is a kind of a park on the edge of the city. There's an old farmhouse-type building, some woodland and a lake. It's quite pretty but you never quite forget the dodgy things that might or might not be going on in the bushes as you take your Sunday afternoon stroll there.

In preparation for a long, hot summer, my friends J and L had invested in a barbecue and they invited me and another friend, R, to its inauguration ceremony. While I moved to Italy on a plane, J and L hired a van, and they have an impressive selection of picnic equipment, including a hamper, a rug and a cool box that is also a radio. The three of us lugged it all on the bus out to the park.

We thought that we had prepared pretty well, but relatively, we were were totally underequipped. The park was heaving with people and they all had far bigger barbecues than we did. Some had chairs and tables. Some were eating lasagne. Some of them even had gazebos. The whole atmosphere was a bit like a music festival, except that the only music was some annoying bloke with bongo drums.

We were a bit taken aback at first but we quickly got into the spirit of it. We lit our charcoal and allowed it to smoulder. We drank wine from plastic tumblers as we waited for our burgers to blacken. We tried not to let our little barbecue suffer from an inferiority complex.

Then, in one final monent of glory (or one desperate attempt to drown out the bongo drums), we turned up the volume on the cool box radio and sang along to Bohemian Rhapsody. J insisted that the people next to us were laughing with us and not at us. She might have been right.

The whole experience seemed, as R said as soon as she arrived, completely and utterly chav-tastic. But then five o'clock came, and almost with one accord, people began to pack away their things. They put their rubbish in black bags, piled it up next to the bins and left the park clean and tidy, ready for the next bank holiday Monday.