It’s a bittersweet time of year. The season of tiny shorts is giving way to wondering whether the trousers you last wore in May still fit. I’ve already seen Christmas tat in The Works; only Sainsbury’s winter-spiced bleach is the greater festive harbinger of mortality. At least we’ve hopefully seen the end of the heatwaves. And, with it, the scourge of the phrase “picky bits”.
For the blissfully uninitiated, picky bits is apparently the new national name for spending £8 on three trays of pastry-wrapped “exotic” confections in a tragic facsimile of the delicious, high-quality deli items our European neighbours enjoy every day of their goddamn lives. Every summer, the ranges get more off their nuts: who knew your picnic needed Turkish grilled pepperoncini and dressed salsa verde chickpeas? (It doesn’t.)
Before brands such as M&S, Waitrose and the Co-op leapt on the cutesy phrase as a way of bankrupting you for sticks of cheese wrapped in ham (and loads of plastic), picky bits had more innocent origins as one of the many terms that Britons use for slapping tomatoes, coleslaw and crisps on the table and letting everyone choose their own dinner.
Its potentially infinite variety demands almost as many names. Back when Twitter was fun, discussions of regional – or just family – difference like this knocked hours off British productivity levels. You call it a picky tea? Table dinner? Lovely. My friend’s mum calls it, quite wonderfully, “a cold collation”. Mine calls it “salad”, despite the sad bistro leaves (served in bag, obviously) being the last thing anyone wants, compared to the salami and dips. Salad cream, however, is crucial. I love linguistic quirks such as this. You call a roll a breadcake, a barm, a cob? Delightful!
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That is, until brands get on board. Suddenly, endearing domestic chatter becomes mortifying when shouted from a 4ft-tall poster at the train station. Removed from the context of the family’s novelty salt and pepper shakers and a sibling squabble over the last sausage roll, picky bits feels – as the New York Times once wrote in a canonical 1994 report about Mr Blobby – like “a metaphor for a nation gone soft in the head”.
Every time I see the phrase in public life it makes me want to do civil disobedience. It’s the Boaty McBoatface of dinner time, exposing our once-repressed nation’s surprisingly twee core and total disregard for shame. Sure, my own personal lexicon is full of embarrassing nonsense, but you’re never going to see [REDACTED] on a billboard overhanging the A4.
Also, most of these supermarket picky bits taste incredibly underwhelming. Have some self-respect and tear a rotisserie chicken apart with your bare hands next time you go to the park.
