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Canberra Today 15°/17° | Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Wine / The plonk, the passion and the picnic

AN urban legend or myth is usually a humorous story told as though true, especially one purporting to involve someone vaguely related or known to the teller.

Richard Calver.
Richard Calver.

“In vino veritas” is an expression that essentially translates to: drunken people tell the truth; the wine’s in and the truth is out. It can be difficult to distinguish the truth from a good story, with or without wine. But even where the story strays to what you might view as urban legend, it can be worth recording.

Is it the truth to record a conversation second hand? To lawyers, the answer is no: that’s branded hearsay, tittle-tattle. But to a writer recording what was said in the aid of truth or perhaps amusement seems paramount. The reader can decide. And this is a story where the truth is assisted by the reader’s favourite tipple.

A picnic is a meal eaten outdoors usually when you are on an excursion. And, in the pleasant relationship-confirming way that you do, I said to my neighbour: “With the weather becoming warmer the mind turns to things picnic and getting back to being in the outdoors.”

Well, she said, would I like a coffee, perhaps a glass of wine, there was a most interesting picnic story that she had to share. That’s when she told me the story of a friend who was desperate and dateless but in the end got her man… and got him good.

The neighbour’s friend, an older woman now on her own, had complained of a Canberra man-drought and had used this rationalisation to sign up for internet dating.

She had coffee with a man who had responded to her internet presence and they arranged a date. It was to be at Tidbinbilla and he would supply the picnic and the wine if she supplied the transport. This was so he could drink the wine without offending the road rules. It was all set.

She collected him from a local shopping centre, he with picnic basket in hand. The couple arrived at the nature reserve in her car and the weather was passable, although not ideal. They ate. They drank. The man’s confidence grew as he splashed most of the wine into his glass and into his system.

In fact he became a bit too confident. Their discussions had moved to matters romance. He stared long and hard into his wine glass and rather unsportingly confessed that he was married and that whilst fat, the woman was sufficiently attractive to, uh, and here I’m being nice, become involved with at a superficial level, but not in any ongoing relationship. Now this is the point at which the urgency of my neighbour’s telling became evident:

“Oh, it’s a scream what then happened,” she tells me. “Well, my friend, she was so annoyed but she hid it, see, to just make sure that he didn’t know how very much he had offended her.”

She kept her cool. The woman spoke softly to the man, saying: “I understand.” After a long pause she then said: “Excuse me, I’ve just got to get something from my car.”

She went to her car, got in and drove away, leaving the intoxicated erstwhile lover in the bush without transport and, most likely, without mobile phone reception. This amused my neighbour and, I do confess, I also fell about laughing, holding tight to my own glass of wine.

In retrospect though, I must say this story has rather blunted my appetite for eating outdoors that, in the circumstances my neighbour so eagerly communicated, would be no picnic.

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Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor

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