Picnics, Pimm's, grass and cricket. The Lord's Test is a uniquely British summer occasion. Nick Coleman tucked into it

There is a small ellipse of rich green grass behind the Warner Stand at Lord's. It is about the size of a tennis court and is girdled by a low wall. A path bisects the lawn allowing foot-traffic to approach a tastefully appointed stand at which Pimm's is served by the jug. At 10.25am on a Test match Sunday the green is alive with activity.

Vigorously, yet decorously, members stake out their patch, unfolding, clipping, stacking, spreading, entrenching their picnic gear - their rugs, their hampers, their portable tables - until the green is a quilt of tiny fiefdoms, each one moated with nine inches of grass, rising at each centre to a mighty castellation of the latest in ice-box technology. Having established themselves, the members then go away and watch the cricket. By 11.02am the green is empty of people. Only the ice-boxes and hampers remain, monumental on their rugs. There is an atmosphere of sumptuous desolation. It is as if some boffin has invented a neutron bomb which, on detonation, vaporises MCC members yet leaves their picnic equipment standing.

The cricket on Sunday was not exciting. It was a day of drift and counter- drift, in which the initiative was offered but declined by both sides for fear of disturbing the nervous equilibrium established over a Test match and a half of fretful striving. The image that filled the mind was of two underweight sumo wrestlers lacking the strength to hump one another out of the ring, instead tacitly agreeing to mooch about in the middle and clash bellies for formality's sake. There were side-issues of course - Rahul Dravid's approaching century, for one, Alec Stewart's approaching superannuation, for another - but by and large torpor reigned. In the stands the usual things were going on: people lining up snacks for the first session, testing the rigidity of the seat-backs in front, settling under their hats.