YOU have to be careful what you say when you’re on the wireless . . .
I took part last week in David Callister’s Sunday morning programme on Manx Radio when his world-wide listenership was invited to ring in with their grumbles about the vicissitudes of modern life.
My role was to let fly with some of mine. It was too good an opportunity to be missed.
I started on impenetrable plastic wrapping, especially that which encases packs of Waitrose moist toilet tissues which I buy for £1 a time in Shoprite.
I forbore to explain to listeners what I used them for, it being a breakfast time programme, but I pointed out strongly that there was no way of getting the plastic off them without resorting to assault with an offensive weapon.
After the programme people made a point of telling me I was wrong.
A lady I know presented me with one of the packs and showed me that all you do is peel back an invisible flap of plastic stuck over a hole which gives access to the tissues.
After this two more packs arrived anonymously in the post, with the flaps peeled back, and I was confronted by a lady in Shoprite who bought one and presented it to me there and then in a similar condition.
All right. I got it wrong. But I defy anybody to detect the little flaps without something to draw attention to them.
Mind you, I have gained four packs of the tissues by the generosity of my challengers with a clear saving of £4.
But this doesn’t make me feel any better about plastic packing.
For instance, try getting through the heavy duty plastic bubble which encases new toothbrushes. Your teeth would fall out before you can slash it open.
As for the pills we all slot into ourselves, they come encased in their own separate little plastic bubbles mounted on a sheet of tinfoil and you have to press the bubbles with maddening force to get them out.
By this time they are broken and nearly reduced to powder – that or they have been fired out at high velocity and lost themselves under the furniture.
But the most potentially lethal plastic wrapping is that in which my monthly copies of The Oldie magazine arrive in the post.
They are hermetically sealed in the wretched stuff. There is nothing to get hold of to strip it away. It needs sharp scissors and increasingly infuriating effort and I find that lack of success drives to me to an excess of impotent fury which one day will need my emergency transfer to the cardiac carvery at Noble’s Hospital.
I would ask the publishers of The Oldie if they are actually trying to kill off their increasingly ageing readership.
If they do, they’ll have something to whinge about like the rest of us.
• A LADY reader wishing to be known only as ‘Elderly Onchanite’ recalls seeing an advertisement in the window of the estate agents Lowey’s in Nelson Street, Douglas, some years ago offering a Spanish villa for sale ‘only three minuets from the beach.’
That’s all right. You can’t do the flamenco properly on sand.
• KEVIN Rothwell draws attention to a Department of Infrastructure public notice in the Isle of Man Courier informing users of Ramsey harbour of a scientific survey to take place by way of two moorings for which co-ordinates were given. Kevin says one appears to be about 60 miles off Whitby.
DOI all at sea?
• THE last and best news media collective noun is as follows: ‘A Parthenon of Columnists.’