Home life
Cardboard Christmas
Alice Thomas Ellis
Christmas is coming. I don't know how the goose is getting on and I don't care either, but the Scotch is appearing again warmly wrapped up in cardboard boxes. I hate cardboard boxes. I hate them with a bitter, twisted, inverted passion that can't be doing me any good. The third son came back from an evening's shopping recently bearing a carrier bag and wearing a little wry smile. He watched me as he put a gold and scarlet box on the table, and I think my reaction was all that he could have wished. There is something smug about cardboard boxes, something over-protective, some- thing nanny-like and overbearing, some- thing patronising and ineffably annoying. Something that drives one to drink.
These seasonal gift packages are the absolute worst, the outside edge, the inky bottom. Why should items that one buys the year round suddenly turn up in fancy dress? Eh? Answer me that. I'll tell you why. It's because the manufacturers think we're all stupid. That's why. They have a (card) board meeting every year, and a chap of generous embonpoint with a watch chain on it sticks his thumbs in his waist- coat, leans back a little and says, 'Christ- mas is here again, fellow directors. Now Mrs Average Idiot in the street out there won't have realised this, so we'll point it out to her. She'll have no idea of what to give as presents even when it's dawned on her, so we'll give her a good hard nudge in the ribs, and we'll gift-wrap our product and adorn it with robins and holly leaves and Daddy Christmas, and then she'll know what to do.' I often give my friends bottles of Scotch and I'm perfectly capable — or at least Janet is — of wrapping them up in festive tissue. I'm not about to send them through the post, dammit, so why put them in that infuriating armour which makes the Boxing Day (boxing!) garbage disposal problem even worse? Two of my hatreds run together here. I detest conifer plantations and I suspect they turn the nasty things into cardboard boxes. Apparently the trees that form those endless combed rows which deform most of the countryside are good for nothing but pulp; so the people who get government grants to plant them and income tax relief when they sell them are largely responsible for the hideous prolif- eration of cardboard boxes. If the trees have to be sold to make cardboard, then the cardboard has to be sold to make boxes. And who pays for the privilege of being buried in redundant packaging? You and me.
Yet another of my hatreds was involved in this festering mélange of prejudice last week: Blue Peter. I never watch Blue Peter because the unworthy hope that the girl swarming down the skyscraper will throttle herself in her abseiling rope is not an emotion of which I am proud. I do not enjoy the vicarious embarrassment of watching eager young people projecting their personality at the wrong camera, or speaking the spontaneous lines which each had arranged the other would say. Their little garden annoys me, and their good works are a depressing contemporary man- ifestation of the efforts of Lady Bountiful Muck: 'Now come on, children. I'm sure we all want to help those who are less fortunate than ourselves.'
But one day, asleep in front of the telly, I woke to the sight of a girl torturing cardboard boxes. Instead of switching over to the snooker I watched with perverted glee as she mutilated a cereal box, a suet box, and a toothpaste box. It was like one of those tasteless Roman gladiatorial spectacles where lions and bears and wild boars bite bits off each other. She covered all those helpless boxes with decorated paper, stuck them together and advised the youth of the country to do likewise and offer them as gifts to their big sister, their mum or their aunty. They could be used, she informed us, either as make-up or sewing boxes.
I don't suppose anyone will actually do it because their mum, if she's got any sense, won't let them make all that mess, but I do hope the daughter or my niece (luckily I haven't got a little sister) weren't watching. Presented with one of these ghastly arte- facts by a loving child you'd have to use it. It would lie around taking up space for the rest of your life, and when you died you'd have to take it with you. I wonder how long it will be before the pressure of the pulp industry and big business forces us all (remember the wool trade and shrouds) to be really, truly, literally buried in card- board boxes.
Alice Thomas Ellis's latest collection, More Home Life, is published by Duck- worth (£9.95).
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