Digested week: Tupperware has filed for bankruptcy. I hope you’re happy, snowflakes | Lucy Mangan
Monday
Today I took my two new kittens to the vet for their immunisations and because at four o’clock this morning one of them threw up a pool of writhing worms. “They should have been wormed every two weeks,” says the vet sternly. “What?” I say, stricken. “I thought it was every month?” “Every fortnight,” he says, even more sternly. “Until they are three months old.”
I feel terrible. My eyes fill with tears and I have to bury my face in the parasite-ridden kitten I am holding until I have control of myself once more.
Goddamn animals. If I’d wanted to go through this kind of guilt again, I’d have had another baby. Although I never felt quite this bad over a human infant. Partly, I suppose, because I never missed an actual medical requirement or treatment with him – but also because I was somehow able to shrug off any lesser criticism. I was 37 when he was born and quite old and vicariously experienced enough (my friends all dropped sprogs like contraception was going out of fashion) to know that no one knows more than a baby’s mother and anyone claiming otherwise can be drop-kicked into oblivion.
But kittens? I don’t know kittens. I could not feel worse about failing them. I hope that by the time they’re old enough for university they can forgive me.
Tuesday
Happy feast day of Saint Hildegard of Bingen, y’all! Abbess, author, mystic, scourge of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa for supporting three antipopes, composer, medic and all-round medieval Benedictine badass – we should all have the bunting out. Not least because of the eel thing.
In the middle ages, people were agreed that eels (which loomed larger in the cultural and comestible firmaments than they do today) reproduced asexually. Hildegard suggested that these creatures who came from the sea might also return to the sea, away from prying eyes, to do their filthy business and that there was no need to assume a virtually unheard of method was at work just because you couldn’t always see exactly what was going on. Naturally, she was ignored because she was just a lady woman.
Repeat throughout history, extrapolate and apply this procedure to much bigger issues than anguillid sex and welcome to the stupid patriarchy.
Wednesday
Another week, another dramatisation of the single most agonising piece of television there has ever been. Last time it was Rufus Sewell as Prince Andrew and Gillian Anderson as Emily Maitlis reproducing the disastrous interview between the bloated royal and the news reporter, in Scoop, for Netflix. This time we had A Very Royal Scandal from Prime Video, starring Michael Sheen as the idiot and Ruth Wilson as his (more or less inadvertent) nemesis.
On the one hand, they have both been pretty pointless, adding (like the various documentaries on and around the subject, plus the musical about the prince more generally) very little to the story that we watched unfold in real time on our screens five years ago.
Five years! But the very fact that it seems but 10 minutes ago speaks to the need these dramas and docs are meeting: namely, helping us to process the trauma. Because by God, it was terrible. “I can’t sweat.” The Woking Pizza Express. “A very ordinary shooting weekend.” “I’m too honourable”. And on and on it went, the man oblivious, the reporter salivating, the audience gaping, cringing, crawling behind the sofa to watch the rest as schadenfreude came, looked around and lit out for a distant horizon.
We still need to take refuge in art. Who knew?
Thursday
Tupperware has filed for bankruptcy. I know. I know. The sky is falling. The 78-year-old firm was founded by Earl Tupper after he realised the potential of the new flexible plastics coming into existence and patented the airtight seal they could produce which would keep your packed lunch sandwiches edible however many days you left them in there before your mum cleaned out your schoolbag at the end of term. The self-made businesswoman Brownie Wise invented the Tupperware party and soon the containers were ubiquitous.
Now, a raft of competitors and increasing material and transportation costs have savaged profit margins, possibly fatally. But the blame really lies in two dismal truths. One, Tupperware was simply too good. My mother’s cupboards are filled with containers that are older than I am, markedly more unscathed and incalculably more flexible than the last half a century has left me. You might occasionally buy more Tupperware, as your needs change, but you never need to replace it.
And two, young people. The snowflake generation, whom I suspect have declined to master the skill required to parp the air out and make sure that seal really IS airtight (it doesn’t just HAPPEN, you know) and instead transferred their lazy, meaningless affections to the clicking and locking nonsense of today. Well, you reap what you sow. A life of stinking sandwiches and schoolbags awaits you. I hope you’re happy.
Friday
I bring you the gladsome tidings that all of south-east London and most of her native Lancashire has been waiting for: my mother’s utility room is back in service.
There was a leak, you see. A leak such as to put the washing machine out of action for a week and to require the replacement of the downstairs loo and the lino throughout. Dark days, my friends, dark days. “First your father dies,” as she so rightly said. “And now this.”
Insurance companies had to be called. Plumbers had to be let in and dehumidifiers installed. Vinyl flooring suppliers had to be interrogated. Choices of sanitaryware had to be made. And all the while whites and darks piled up in unprecedented heaps in the spare room. We barely made it through.
But now the room is dry. The scree is down. The plaster is smooth. The loo is in and the lino is coming. The washing machine has been running for 12 hours and the weather has held for pegging out. All will soon be as it was, except for the two daughters hospitalised with nervous breakdowns. Praise be.
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