Drink more: wine glass holders and other outdoors excellence

You reach the end of summer and belatedly stumble across the thing that would have made the unexpected hot evenings in the park or garden just a tiny bit more civilised. 

The wine glass holder you can spike into the grass on a picnic or other outdoor drinking excursion is hardly a new product.

But simply because this one (from Stripey City on Etsy) is rather nicely made and photographed well, it suddenly seemed like the kind of thing it would be good to have.

This one is also rather pricey: it costs £16.41 – it's also only available for delivery in the US and Canada.

Which got me straight over to Lakeland, checking out their versions afresh. Made from recycled, brightly coloured plastic they are not quite so slick to look at, but then they are only £4.49 for a set of four. Find them here – and maybe we'll be lucky over the next few weeks and not even have to wait till next year to get them out.



Inevitably sucked into the Lakeland website – the retail equivalent of crack – I also noticed they have an exclusive range of equally useful Thermos things which, we must brace ourselves, will be more useful very soon.

This nice set, in old-school racing green, includes a big and not-so-big classic drinks flask, and also the clever, and pleasingly shaped Thermos Food King Flask, which will keep last night's heated up leftovers hot for seven hours and comes with a folding metal spoon and everything. This and the smaller flask are £19.99 each and the big flask is £29.99 and they come in red, too.

Check out, too, another excellent drink-holding solution in this previous post – it's useful all year round. There's a link there to some other ingenious products you never knew you needed.

Words: Kate Burt