PG Wodehouse Picnic in Pictures

Although Bertie Wooster gets into an alarming number of scrapes in P G Wodehouse's Jeeves novels, we can't help but admire his fortitude and stick with it attitude when it comes to dining. Hot weather, bright sunshine, crowds of yelping children are no obstacles for the man who wants, needs, and has to have his tea. It helps, of course, to have a butler like Jeeves to provide the necessary.

And so it was that we found ourselves in Russell Square this past weekend to celebrate the launch of the entire P G Wodehouse canon reissued by Arrow Books. We nibbled bread pudding and skirted around the cucumber sandwiches, dodged around croquet games that seemed to feature endless streams of small children brandishing croquet mallets at adult crotch height and squealed a lot during the pig racing. There was bunting. There was a quintet performing songs even Lord Emsworth would have been enticed to jig to. Sack races and raucous egg and spoon races also broke up the drowsy afternoon in the sunshine in a charmingly diverting way. And there was newt painting for the young Gussie Fink-Nottles among the crowd.