Now that the barbecue season is upon us, I suppose I'll have to gird myself and give it a go. The barbecue that has taken up residence at our house is vast. It looks like a 1950s immersion heater, or an East German car, and sits against the wall outside as if asleep. I don't use it, despite the recently clement weather. Just between us, I'm scared of it and I'm not sure what the knobs do. I believe it incorporates a smoker, a trio of custom burners and a spit for suckling pig (something I have vowed never to eat on account of it being in terribly poor taste. Ditto whitebait, foie gras, rabbit and baby vegetables).
Even if I could bring myself to tackle the Barbecue Beast, I couldn't possibly just chuck any old meat into its ravenous maw. No way. Gone are the simple barbecue standards of our youth - the sausage, the burger and the chicken drumstick, served classic style (in light rain). These days, it's all seared swordfish. Or marinated marlin. Or tiger prawns in their shells, or - at the very least - sirloin steak.
I think I shall settle instead for the warm salad. Yup. Warm salad, one of those oxymoronic dishes which has somehow insinuated itself onto our national summer menu. Decorative though it is, with its lardons and croutons and add-ons, the leaves will inevitably have been fished out of a Maxi-Pack Pre-Wash No-Fuss Grab Bag. We really are an idle bunch, you and I. Somewhere along the line - sandwiched, perhaps, between the arrival of the remote control and the death of the mangle - we have forgotten the ancient art of salad washing. Our ancestors were forever polishing lettuce. My nan had one of those salad spinners, which sent leaves hurtling through space at warp speed and produced enough water to irrigate a smallholding. But today we buy ready-washed snob leaves trapped in a plastic bag. Posh leaves, like radicchio, arugula, endive and mesclun. Have you noticed how they go off just after you leave the car park at Sainsbury's, as if they have given up the will to live? How many times have you discovered an opened bag of green soup lurking in the salad drawer of your Smeg? And, anyway, did you know that your chard and dandelion has probably been washed in solutions of chlorine 20 times stronger than those used to neutralise the wee in swimming pools? Thought not. Go on, buy an old-fashioned, unwashed lettuce.
Once you've got it, you'll be drizzling it with balsamic, right? Balsamic vinegar is one of those ingredients that was once welcome at all the right parties. But it is starting to show up everywhere, a bit like Peter Andre. Got a white plate? A dribble of balsamic encircling everything like a cheap necklace is just the job. Except that it isn't. It's a cliche. While we're at it, chilli jam has surely had its chips. If you go out to eat these days, you have to wade through gallons of the stuff to get to your pudding course, whether you're in a Michelin star or a Harvester bar. And talking of chips, can we put a stop to chi-chi restaurants serving them in Jenga formation? Whoever invented this clearly had way too much time on his hands. And, since I'm on a roll, give me restaurant bread without sultanas in it. Or sun-blush tomatoes. I can get quite exercised about sun-blush tomatoes, surely the marketing man's finest hour ('Josh, these wizened tomatoes just aren't selling. Any ideas?')
But there is something even more irksome out there. It is the new curse, the epidemic of our time. I'm talking about the patio heater. Everywhere you go - every pub, bar, restaurant and caff - one of these aluminium triffids will blast you with its dragon's breath of hot air. Over time (four pints, say), it brûlées just one side of your face. Outside of the zone, the wind might whistle across the tundra, but within its incubating heat, you could be on the Algarve, or in the bowels of Hades. I regularly leave outdoor tables part-baked, with one half of my face a throbbing crimson, and the other a pale and underdone grey. The idea is to fool us that we reside in balmy climes, Aix-en-Provence, perhaps, or Nassau. We don't.
Thanks to its basting heat, any old pocket of draughty pavement can now boast a rickety table and chairs. We've all gone Urban Al Fresco, from Catford to Dundee, somehow conning ourselves that dining in the middle of the A406 dual carriageway is a step up from dining in the rich soup of nicotine and beer found within the welcoming walls of a gastropub. I have lost count of the lunching conversations I've missed because of wailing sirens, farting trucks and the dulcet thrub of pneumatic drill tucking into tarmac. It's all very well to feel dirty and gritty in the summer, but not when you popped out for a quick lunch of seared marlin, served with chilli jam, Jenga chips, sultana bread and a nice warm salad. Perhaps I'll manage a couple of rounds with the Barbecue Beast after all.