Meat me in the summer

‘I’ll bring the chicken and the pork if you bring some burgers and sausages.”

The man intent on closing the deal is bellowing at his friend - who can’t be more than three feet away - as if he were somewhere just north of Barcelona. It’s the excitement of it all, you see; this is clearly going to be the first T-shirt friendly Sunday of the year and every man and his hot dog is up for a barbecue and all that that entails.

The first sight that had greeted me as I emerged from my house late in the morning was my neighbours expertly putting up a tarpaulin the size of Kazakhstan to keep the unforgiving sun at bay, while their friends set out tables and chairs and cracked open a couple of pre-match beers. This was clearly going to be an unofficial inauguration of the summer. “No point waiting for the official date (the festival of San Juan in June) because we might all be goners by then” seemed to be the prevailing mood. With “Anyway, if we are still around, we’ll cook a feast then, too” tacked on at the end as a rather welcome appendage.

Meanwhile, as I continued on up the hill to dump my rubbish, small groups of locals were scurrying hither and yon, clutching bags of goodies yet to be grilled and nodding conspiratorially at each other. If there was anyone in the village not involved in a barbecue last Sunday, they were certainly keeping a very low profile.

Right, ok, at the risk of party pooping in extremis, it’s time for me to ‘fess up - I don’t really like barbecues. Maybe it’s the mildly pervasive threat of salmonella or maybe it’s the self-appointed DJ hovering over the reggaeton play button. Very Bad Bunny. It’s also possible it’s just the fact that they tend to go on for far too long and the last beers in the cool box can taste remarkably like oxtail soup. Who knows? But it’s better to be honest about these things.

Well, sort of. I didn’t, of course, offer any of the above reasons for not popping round to my neighbours’ shindig when they very kindly invited me to join them, but rather that I had some paperwork I needed to finish quite urgently, which was also true.

A little later, as I sat filing some 2024 social security receipts, chomping on a cheese and beetroot sandwich, I may have detected a slight pang of regret somewhere deep within, although I can’t be entirely sure.

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