The best picnics are always the most simple. Bread and chorizo with fizzy cider in Normandy. Queso fresco and peaches by a fountain in Spain. Figs and goat's cheese and crackers overlooking the Atlantic in Portugal. Dark chocolate and almonds and dates on a long walk in the Great Otway National Park. I've spent a lot of time outside in my life, and enjoyed a lot of outdoor picnics.

The one picnic that comes to mind for me is in 2001, just after the 9/11. My little boy and I were on a ferry to Ireland watching the towers collapse in real time and I started thinking that it maybe wasn't a good idea travelling Europe and the UK alone with a 4 year old. We'd landed in Dublin and people were crying in the streets.

^{I definitely don't pluck my eyebrows so severely these days :P}

We got out of Dublin pretty fast. The city hostels weren't amenable to Jarrah sleeping in a dorm in my bed - some vagaries about insurance. I found this upsetting after how welcoming hostels were on the continent. We took a bus to the Dingle Peninsula, by which time I started feeling very, very ill, heading into a week long flu that had me barely getting out of bed, and was probably a result of the high emotion experience as the world completely changed around us.

We were staying in an old hunting lodge, a short walk from the beach, but I couldn't move. It was about as much as I could do to get up and make dinner for my boy - luckily I'd arrived with a bag of groceries, as I was travelling on the cheap and carried things like pasta and weetabix, milk and crackers, cheese and vegetables. I'd lie in bed dozing as Jarrah played Lego on the floor beside me, listening to him chatter and feeling awful and homesick.

One sunny day, I felt a little better, and made a couple of sandwiches and put a pack of ginger biscuits into the backpack. We walked slowly to the beach, my legs aching and my chest hurting whilst Jarrah jumped around like a cow just let out of the stables. It was cold on the beach and I gave him my hoodie, protective of my little one and feeling bad he'd been unable to get out and play whilst I was sick. There was no one at all around and he was so happy to be on the beach. We ate our sandwiches and biscuits and built a sandcastle, and hoped to see the dolphin that was rumoured to live in the area, without much luck.

Despite the uncertainty and the flu that was lingering, I felt even then that it would be a good memory. We walked back up the hill picking and eating blackberries, a heavenly feast for a little boy who marvelled at such things. For dinner we ate blackberry pancakes, and all felt right with the world, for a precious moment.

I was talking about this the other day with my boy, now 26 years old with a kid of his own. Despite forgetting a lot of things about that year, being so young, he remembered that day - not the memory of the burning towers, or me being ill, but the picnic on the beach, and the juicy blackberries plucked from the brambles for pancakes.