…plastic packaging is neither big nor clever!
1. “If I were an arthriticky old woman I wouldn’t be able to have a ham sandwich!” This is part of the soundtrack of my girlies’ growing up. After picking away fruitlessly at the ‘easy peel’ tab on the plastic packet of ‘plastic’ ham I would, almost always, snarl these words, just before morphing into a version of Norman Bates’ younger sister and thrashing about, in a crescendo of psychotic lacerating. All this just to cobble together a couple of rounds for lunch! Jam anyone?
2. Have you ever, in all your days, been inveigled into purchasing your bananas, individually, sheathed in polythene? No!? I thought not. Anyone who knows me well will have heard me endlessly rail against the barbaric practice of covering cucumbers in plastic. You don’t get your courgettes, aubergines, avocadoes plasticised and what if your carrots and parsnips came enveloped in PVC? Well, I, for one, do not wish to endure my salad items erupting, phallus-like, from shrink wrap, it’s not natural and if we stand for it, it’s only a matter of time before we have individually wrapped grapes foisted upon us!
3. I once spent an entire morning trying to wrangle a virgin packet of ‘sticky notes’ out of its, tightly welded on, cellophane packaging. I had been tasked with designing a group training session on ‘Managing Anxiety’ and had come up with a pretty nifty idea for the exercise. The fly in the ointment transpired to be, not the content of the lesson, but instead the requirement for the students to stick their thoughts and ideas, around and about, with the aid of the trusty adhesive paper square. I enlisted methods of scraping, biting, picking and scissoring to release the little sods, but after ripping off half of my fingernails, setting all my teeth on edge and sustaining a blood wound that required several antiseptic wipes and three plasters (also almost impossible to liberate from their own hygienic, plastic, encasements), I deemed the wretched notes impregnable, turfed the buggers into the bin and resigned myself to cutting out squares of scrap paper and passing round the bloody glue sticks!
4. Am I, I often wonder, the only person in the known world to have been unable to successfully emancipate an intact packet sandwich from its moorings? Regardless of the purveyor of the fodder, I have attempted them all and, to date, my record is one hundred percent for launching the sandwich skywards and being left clutching a paw full of distorted and unrecognisable filling. My accomplishment in this field of endeavour has also extended to tubes of sweets and, most spectacularly explosive, packets of digestive biscuits. My advice…a loaf and a packet of ham!
5. Towards the end of the enforced retreat from worldliness, hobnobbing and mingling with the masses, I had noticed that there were some elements of my life that had begun to take something of a downwards trajectory… my penchant for wearing slippers, my naked face (largely due to my inability to extricate the new mascara from the loathesome plastic) and, I shudder to admit, the state of my underwear. Having got within spitting distance of the re-opening of commerce, I panicked, broke early and, in a flurry of unbridled excitement, ordered twelve beautiful new pairs of pants. These little blessings duly arrived, throughout the post, but dismayed was I at the generous size of the (plastic) package they came in…now we’ve all put a few pounds on and comfort is king, but the capacious size of the bag just seemed unrealistically vast for twelve undergarments, even for my generous girth! The mystery was soon solved as I extracted the lovely lingerie, each one individually suspended on a black, plastic hanger! What madness is this? Who in their right… or even their wrong… mind would hang their knickers up? What, in the name of Beelzebub do ‘sparks and mencers’ think a woman is going to do with twelve diminutive hangers…not to mention the two plastic tags, three plasticised cardboard labels and a large sticker? I pondered the benefits of creating an art installation with them, using them, somehow, on washing days, hanging fairy lights on them, but in the final analysis, they were utterly pointless and useless.
“And there’s nothing I can say, we’re throwing it all away” Thank you Genesis.