Perfect partners

 

Perfect partners

I must thank Liz Hinds for the inspiration behind this post. She was talking about her venerable Tupperware container, and I was amazed that it still had a lid. Forty years together and never been parted. Astonishing!

I have a collection of lids and another of bottoms, but they just cannot get along together – too big, too small, too wide, too narrow. When I declare that I’ve had enough and swear to throw them out, which I do all too often, my pragmatic husband advises me to ‘hang on to them, just in case.’ 

So, I do, but then, determined to have matching tops and bottoms at some point in my life, I search online until I find the perfect set that will never be parted. The parcel arrives, I unwrap it and proudly display the treasures within, pristine, with their prettily coloured tops, and put them away, swearing that this time, they will remain wedded forever.

And so they do  . . . until I lose the power over them, and someone – no names, no pack drill! – uses one part of a pair and leaves its soulmate behind, and then I have gaily coloured lids with absent bottoms.

‘Use clingfilm,’ someone suggests, but I cannot. Clingfilm loves me with undying ardour and will cling only to me and itself. It refuses to leave my embrace and sulks and splits if I attempt to force it. I look enviously at other people’s fridges – (well, my family’s, I don’t go peering into other folks’ storage spaces.) Their soups and sauces, leftover vegetables, cold meats are all complacently encased in containers covered in tightly stretched, wrinkle-free clingfilm. ‘How do they do it?’ I ask myself as I attempt once more to make it go where I want it to.

 Actually, clingfilm, doesn’t love me – it hates me with a passion and has formed an alliance with aluminium foil, which also will not do what I ask of it. I carefully tear along the sharp edge of the box (which also does not like me and takes lumps out of my fingers) but the cut is never straight. It goes off at an angle, proving its singlemindedness, and leaving me with a piece that doesn’t quite fit what I planned for it.

There is only one answer, well, two or three, really:

 Cook or prepare just enough so that there is nothing left over;

Give the leftovers to the always attendant dogs, which they would love but would not be particularly good for them;

Eat out at every available opportunity;

Employ a housekeeper (I like this idea!);

Keep trying, and I am – very trying.