Busybodies triggering my temper
RI KNEW this would happen. I predicted it on these pages just a few months ago.The dreaded “trigger warning” is spreading, like a rogue virus. It’s already infected television, theatre and film. Now it’s moved on to... packaging.Yes. Packaging.
It was my birthday this week. (Please don’t ask which one. I’m really trying to forget).And, lo, mid-afternoon on the dreaded day, a parcel arrived.
From its shape it was quite obviously a bottle of something or other.And closer inspection revealed the words “Wine” “Côte de Provence” and “Gift” printed on three of the oblong sides. OK. So far, so obvious. Someone had very kindly sent me a birthday bottle of wine. Lovely.
Then I turned to the fourth side.The first thing I read was “Open carefully”.
Well, d’oh! And there was me, reaching for a lump-hammer to bust the box open! Like you do to something with a glass bottle inside. Grrr, etc.
But there was worse. Under the utterly superfluous “Open carefully” was this. “DRINK RESPONSIBLY”. Uhh? So I need not only to be patronisingly instructed how to open a parcel with a wine bottle self-evidently inside, but given a two-word infantilising lecture on how much of it then to consume when I’ve, under such caring advice, prised it free.
“Drink responsibly”!?! Just how much would this insufferably bossy delivery company see fit for me to neck on my birthday? Half a glass? Half a bottle? Over what period of time, exactly? And what about anyone who might be with me? How much would be judged “responsible” for them to enjoy? What if there were three of us? Could we neck the lot between us? Or would that be deemed irresponsible?
Or, to ask the only really relevant question – what business is it of anyone’s how much of a birthday bottle of wine I drink solo, or care to share? Let alone the delivery company that has been paid to bring it to my door.
Can you imagine how you’d feel if, when you bought a nice bottle of Sancerre at your local off-licence, the person pushing it across the counter to you haughtily enjoined you to “drink responsibly”?
I think you might unscrew/ uncork it on the spot and pour it over their silly condescending head.
J EVERYTHING new I learn about the Queen – Queen Camilla, that is – either makes me nod with quiet approval, or smile. I smiled this week when I read that she habitually waves at air ambulances when they fly over her Wiltshire garden. I can just see her at it, too, can’t you? It’s somehow a very Camilla-kind-ofthing to do.
It’s not just her innate sense of fun, of course – she’s the ambulance patron in Wiltshire, so whenever she hears the chop-chop-chop of an approaching whirlybird, she feels duty-bound to run outside and give them an encouraging wave.
She’s 76 and still bubbling with girlish enthusiasm. I love her.