It’s surely no accident that the funniest chapter in the greatest masterpiece of English nonsense literature is a description of a picnic. And yes, I am well aware that (according to some of his more sensationalist biographers) Lewis Carroll was either on drugs or indulging in paedophiliac fantasies, or possibly both, when he penned Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I don’t care. When he dreamed up Chapter 7 – A Mad Tea Party (not, please, The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party; it was actually held in the March Hare’s garden) – he was, consciously or unconsciously, giving us the quintessential portrait for all time of one of the great tribal bonding-rites of the British summer.

That we are a nation of eccentrics has never been seriously doubted, either by foreigners or natives. But there’s something about the word “picnic” that brings out a specially looney streak in the British temperament – something that goes well beyond eccentricity. We are talking serious insanity here, tinged with pride, stoicism, a stubborn refusal to bow to the inevitable – and all those other qualities that may seem mightily impressive when displayed at Dunkirk, Balaclava or Rorke’s Drift, but look pretty daft when applied to the task of fixing a spoonful of clotted cream to the top of a scone in a stiff breeze and light drizzle while perching in a dinner jacket on a collapsible canvas stool.

These thoughts crossed my mind last Saturday when I attended the opening evening of the Glyndebourne opera season. It's not my intention here to offer a scathing class-critique of what goes on at that venerable Sussex institution, though I must confess to a small twinge of unreconstructed liberal guilt when I glanced at my ticket – which, being a critic, I had not paid for – and saw the eye-popping figure “£165”. (And that, it turned out, was for one of the cheap nights; if you harbour the bizarre desire to sit through Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde the price in the stalls goes up to £185.)

No, what always fascinates me about Glyndebourne is the picnicking. Of course, it is a British citizen’s inalienable right – and indeed duty, before global warming turns the Home Counties into Tunisia – to shiver round a picnic at any time and in any place. It’s just that at Glyndebourne the corporate suits take their picnics very seriously indeed. Especially the suits out to impress their bosses, their Japanese clients or their mistresses – which means roughly 75 per cent of the audience.

These days almost nobody (except yours truly) simply squats on an old rug and tucks into Marmite sarnies and a flask of Typhoo. Most punters seem to bring with them the entire contents of a garden-furniture super-store, plus food-hampers the size of Hampshire, plus mini-fridges for the bubbly, and enough cutlery to feed the proverbial five thousand in the unlikely event of Jesus Christ timing his Second Coming to coincide with the supper break in an English country house.

Well, that’s all very well on balmy summer evenings when the mercury hovers resolutely in the high seventies. Then alfresco dining might actually – heaven forfend – turn out to be quite good fun. But in my experience such nights are rare on the South Downs.

Much more typical is what we got on Saturday: scurrying clouds, a stiff breeze, and temperatures in which no self-regarding French woman would be caught without her fur coat and thermal suspenders.

But it’s when striding indomitably out into this sort of bracing clime that the British are at their most magnificent. Noël Coward got it wrong. Mad dogs may well go out in the midday sun – but Englishmen, and women, much prefer an evening cloudburst, especially if they are dressed up to the nines.

Ladies at Glyndebourne adopt that fierce “I’ve paid six hundred quid for this little silk off-the-shoulder number and I’m damn well going to flaunt it” expression, and march purposefully across the lawns, their majestic progress hampered only by the lamentable tendency of six-inch stilettos to plunge like daggers into squelchy turf. Meanwhile the corporate bigwigs bray ever more heartily as the barometer drops – mainly, I guess, to stop their dentures chattering and their toupees freezing. All in all, it’s a gloriously surreal spectacle. The operas usually aren’t half as entertaining. Indeed, after you have experienced a Glyndebourne supper interval you are inclined to think that Lewis Carroll actually underplayed the madness of the English picnic.

Of course, you don’t have to go to Glyndebourne to enjoy the traditional British picnic. You could just select a damp, windy evening, dress up in your most expensive glad-rags, invite a few friends to sit on wonky deckchairs in your own garden, and spend an hour trying to fathom out the plot of an opera that none of you has the slightest interest in, while a fine mist of rain gently turns one of M&S’s finest quiches into the culinary equivalent of papier-mâché. Hey presto! You will have reproduced the essential elements of the Glyndebourne picnic experience in all their exquisite glory.

And with the £165 you will have saved by not buying a ticket, you’ll be able to stock up on Beecham’s Powders and hot-water bottles for later in the night. Believe me, you’ll be needing them.

A U-turn or two on the way to the top
So let’s get this straight. The Tories, once staunch defenders of selective education, are abandoning grammar schools. Labour, the party of ordinary people, is allowing giant supermarkets and developers to concrete over whatever green fields still remain in England, without any boring obligation to consult locals. The Scottish Nationalists are furiously soft-pedalling on, er, Scottish nationalism. And Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness now love nothing better than to treat each other to dinner and a movie.

Put aside, for a moment, consideration of whether these developments are good or bad. Just ask yourself this question: can you name a single present-day British politician who would stick with his most cherished beliefs if they got in the way of power?

Bad, actually
Nobody admires Richard Curtis’s films and TV shows – the likes of Four Weddings and Blackadder – more than I do. Well, OK, I suspect that Curtis himself might. But I’m afraid the great producer had a bad attack of what doctors call luvvius delusius when he used his Bafta speech to castigate politicians for not giving the British film and TV industry the respect and funding he thinks it deserves. The problem with today’s politicians, he said, was that “they don’t watch enough TV”. If they did “they would be happier and they would know more about the country they live in”.

Never mind the country we live in. Is Curtis living on the same planet as the rest of us? British TV has never made people less happy – which is why the ratings are plunging more dramatically than a starlet’s décolletage.

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