“Summer,” said Lytton Strachey, “is the most spiteful of all seasons.” What better occasion, then, to get back at a jilting lover or double-crossing friend, than a beautiful summer’s day? The sun is in the sky, the smell of fresh grass, the drowsy buzz of hayfever in your nostrils… head for a favourite country spot and prepare them a picnic they’ll never forget: a picnic of fully cruel intent. Our handy guide will help you decide what to buy for it this summer.

The Hamper

The first step to successfully preparing a cruel picnic is to find a cruel enough hamper to put it all in. The canvas bag will certainly not do: it is a comforting reminder of a distant, canvas home. Wicker might initially seem homely and twee, but it is in fact a decently cruel substance: always wrenching and cracking, one thinks it is always on the verge of collapse. But it is undermined by its relative transparency: the wicker basket promises one that it can be seen into, and thus the space it contains is not, truly, a void.

We would, then, recommend a somewhat unusual picnic hamper. This would be, a large and heavy metal box: solid and unyielding. The box will have a padlock on it, so your enemy will know they can’t get in without you letting them at the food. Preferably, the hamper will be of military origin: you can get some good medium-size arms boxes from military surplus shops that are ideal.

An alternative is to simply pack everything up in plastic shopping bags. This has the advantage of inconvenience, since it means a multiplicity of containers, and once they’re empty they will tend to blow away in the wind. However, they can come across as something of a cheap move, which your enemy will use against you. If you do insist on using plastic bags, I would recommend old, crinkly ones from Sainsbury’s that have been left for months in a draw: no bag crinkles quite like Sainsbury’s do, and it is a frustrating, grating crinkling, without end or cure.

Cruel Fruit

It has been a matter of some debate in the Sensitive Man offices as to what the cruellest fruit is. The first put forward was the common pear: not the delicious, oozing, fat light green sort you often see on a summer’s fruit stand, but rather the scratchy, too-crunchy Conference: a poor substitute for the sensuality and sweetness of Real Fruit. But whilst a bad pear can be a potentially very cruel thing indeed, the pear is, as a fruit generally, too inconsistent: even old father Conference can occasionally throw up a delicious specimen. No, packing a pear in your cruel picnic could just as easily backfire.

Thoughts turn, then, to the spiky fruits: lychees (too delicious, though the skin is an irritant, and they are small), pineapples (perhaps), guanabanas (if you can find them), dragon fruit (oft mistaken for the imminently blooming heads of flowers by non-connoisseurs), the custard-apple (or ‘bullock’s heart’)… certainly some good options there, if you can find the right specimens. But it seems decidedly the case that no fruit could be crueller, if you can get hold of one, than the Dorian Fruit.

Known in the Asia as the “King of Fruits,” the Dorian has a famously horrible, slightly almond-y smell that has been compared to old gym shoes and turpentine. It is large and spiky on the outside, and the insides look a bit like curdled aubergine, or a dead Cornish pasty. You should force your enemy to eat great helpings of it if at all possible.

Cruel Cheeses

Your mother always told you growing up that the cruellest cheese was stilton, because the pattern of the veins resembles that of the blood vessels on a dead infant’s head. That strong, mouldy taste is also often deemed cruel. But in our opinion, stilton is simply too violent, too explicit, to be deemed properly cruel. Cruelty should be about passive, unpleasant creep, and for this purpose, there is no better cheese than Wensleydale.

Wensleydale is, at first taste, so bland as to be disturbing. It is thus in itself a cruel act merely to serve Wensleydale to a guest: one expects cheese to taste of something, anything, at all. The fact that it doesn’t always keeps one eating Wensleydale all the more, in an always-vain bid to find the flavour. But it is not mere blandness that makes Wensleydale the cruellest of all cheeses: it is that horrific crumbliness, and that blank white colour. Yes, if there is one cheese you want to serve to get your enemy mewling in horror, it is Wallace’s Favourite itself.

A Sensitive Man’s Cruel Potato Salad

No picnic, cruel or otherwise, would be complete without lavish dollopings of potato salad. But of course, this most benign and loving of all food items seems to utterly lack cruelty: despite looking a bit like lumpy ejaculate, it is one of the most tasty and comforting of all dishes. You simply cannot buy a decently cruel potato salad in the supermarket. Although you might find one on the deli counter, by coincidence, we think that you would be better off preparing from our own recipe:

You will need:

450g (1lb) any potatoes
4 spring onions
½ jar mayonnaise
2 tbsp crème fraîche

3 tbsp chopped parsley

1 tbsp dill

1 tbsp animal urine

A lemon (optional)

Method:

Chop the potatoes and boil briefly: potatoes should ideally not be raw, but must be too hard to be considered edible by polite society. Chop the spring onions, including stalks, and add (by which I mean, add it all including the stalks). Put the potatoes in a bowl with the spring onions and add large amounts of mayonnaise and the crème fraiche. Chop the dill and parsley and add. Also add the lemon juice if you want. Finally – and this is, really, the crucial ingredient that makes the dish ‘cruel’ – add the tablespoon of animal urine. This can be the urine of any animal, but not a human being. I find sheep’s or cat’s urine works particularly well. The idea behind the cruel potato salad is that your enemy should be able to taste the urine slightly through the rest of the dressing, but only enough to arouse their merest suspicions, thus leaving them with a vague sense of abjection and dread.

Serve on dry crackers.

Cruel Sandwiches

This is really a no-brainer. Received wisdom says that the cruelest sandwich meat is Smoked Ox Tongue, and in this instance we do not disagree. Lavish vast quantities of English mustard on rye bread and pile on the tongue. Add mayonnaise if you only want your sandwiches to be moderately cruel.

For those who don’t like Tongue, try some sort of rancid-egg-and-salmon combo.

Cruel Wines

Red:The Gallo family are the kings of the ‘cruel red’. Grab a couple of bottles of their watery, tasteless swill and serve as cold as you can possibly get it in the summer heat.

White: Whilst most supermarket reds are pretty drinkable nowadays, the same does not go for the whites at all. Get a bottle of the cheapest Tesco slosh you can find and leave out in the sun until it begins to turn into the vinegar it always kind of resembled.

Rose: The taste of hen nights and early menopause inheres in all bottles of Rose, one of the most disgusting drinks ever conceived, alcohol or no. Any bottle will do, warm or cold.

Sparkling/Champagne: With sparkling wines or champagne, if you want to be really cruel you want a volatile, fizzing beast that injures when opened and never settles in the glass. We recommend most supermarket near-Bruts.

If it’s beer you’re after, then the perfect complement to the cruel foods of the picnic would be small, warm bottle of Hoegaarden, for its strong, marzipan flavour.

The Aftermath

Ideally, then, your cruel picnic has come off perfectly. Your enemy has been beaten into submission with your selection of spiteful picnic items: ants have overrun the dirty remnants of your food, crumbs and the pitter-patter of insect steps pursuing them causing your enemy’s skin to tingle with a vague sense of anxiety and regret. The aim of the cruel picnic should not be to trigger an all-out argument or brawl: the idea is to make your enemy feel bad about themselves without entirely knowing why. Traditionalists would say, then, that the best way to end a cruel picnic is to simply leave, but actually I think the best way is to offer your enemy a ride home and then, once you’re in the car, to declare: “let’s go to the hospital!”, insisting that they look ill from the food, that they are breaking out in tick-hives, and waiting in the cloying, summer’s A&E with them for hours, not saying a word. When the doctor finally summons them, simply leave, stranding them in this unusual hospital with no explanation, and likely a total sneering rejection from the doctor as well.