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Postcard from Portugal

My morning routine includes me sticking the dog in the back of the car and taking her to one of the many open spaces round here in which she can sniff, run, and work up an appetite. I stroll along thinking deep thoughts.

On the initial journey I pass two 11-year-old boys waiting outside their houses for the school bus. For the last two weeks one of the boys has been missing. I mentioned this to my friend José over a beer.

“Didn’t you hear? The boy’s dead.  He must be the one. Lived near you. Knocked down by a car outside his school.”

I expressed my genuine shock and sympathy.

“That’s not the worst of it,” José told me. “Apparently he didn’t want to go to school that day.  My wife says he told his mum he didn’t feel well. She gave him a quick smack on the bum, and told him to get out and wait for the bus. Now she’s on tranquillisers. Can’t do anything. Had to be dragged away from his casket at the cemetery.”

So where have I heard this before? Yes. Aberfan, 1966. The landslide that killed 144 people including most of the pupils at a primary school that lay directly in its path. And yes, the mother who rejected her 10 year old son’s appeal to be allowed to stay home for the day and sent him off, her last memory of him, the perfunctory clip round the ear that sent him on his way.

There was a time when the hardest item in the world to unwrap was a Boot’s toothbrush. It sat there in its hard plastic case defying you to get it out, knowing that if you used scissors or a bread knife (you’d given up in the bathroom and had retreated to the kitchen) either implement would slip and gash whatever hand was holding the case. At one time I suspected a Boot’s plot to increase sales of antiseptic and sticking plastic.  I never looked, but I expect it had a small entry in the Guinness Book of Records. Anyway, whoever the designer was, he or she has been transferred at a huge fee to the Portuguese biscuit industry.

But the designer has changed tactics. Packets of biscuits are not as unyielding as the Boot’s TB, just a lot trickier. Those that have adopted the modern practice of having a ring round the top of the packet and an arrow saying ‘Pull Here’(or ‘Tire Aqui’) have refined it to having the arrow pointing the wrong way, or placing it a few centimetres below the line.

The result of all this is that hopeful biscuit eaters lose their tempers and their opening attempts break and crumble the top four or five goodies. Even the upmarket chocolate or jam filled biscuits present their own hazards, a plastic case inside a paper container that has not been strong enough to withstand the weight of other plastic cases inside paper containers, landing you with an assortment of edible, but well broken, biscuits.

And at the other end of the day’s supermarketing, there is the other Hazard, the plastic bag. (No sign here of the UK’s determination to get rid of them). My local store leaves its plastic bags at the end of the counter beyond the till.

The first problem is releasing one bag from the stack of 50 or more, and then trying to find some way of opening the bag while the shopping piles up, the girl is waiting for the money, the customer in front of you has not yet packed all his or her shopping, and the queue behind you is muttering. So what - they’ll have to do the same themselves, and will probably be slower than you.

And one more thing. Why do the Portuguese buy a plastic bag of potatoes complete with a carrying handle, and then put it into another plastic bag. Probably because the bag is free.