Expanded Polystyrene and Tombolas

I'm staring at the wreckage of my healthy eating lunch. I had a problem with it, balsamic vinegar dressing looks too much like gravy, and who wants salad with gravy? The remnants are looking rather sad, scattered around messily in one of those horrid expanded polystyrene containers that destroy the world. If you use a real knife and fork, they 'carve' indentations across the bottom. It's a bit strange, not hitting a china plate when you cut your tatty, just a squidgy experience of slicing the soft container. This probably releases minute particles of polystyrene into the salad and has probably given me cancer. So, my lunch has probably helped destroy the world and given me cancer, and it didn't even taste that good.

Plastic is horrid stuff. I've given up drinking wine in plastic cups, finally realising that part of the lovely thing about wine is seeing how the light reflects the colour through the glass, either honeyed shades of white, or blackcurranty red. Holding a plastic cup with an opaque plastic tint doesn't do it for me anymore (unless on a picnic, where different rules apply). If you are at an event where the wine is proffered in plastic, my advice is to ask for a cup of tea in a mug. Someone will probably be quite pleased to have an opportunity to put their feet up in the kitchen while the kettle boils anyway. Make sure you state the 'mug' part, otherwise you are in danger of having more disappointing expanded polystyrene. While you wait for the tea, you can have another couple of goes at losing money on the tombola (you knew you were going to lose anyway, so don't get upset). Which reminds me, once I won a jar of something on a tombola, and my cynical friend smirked (which I attributed to jealousy at the time) and said it was bound to be past its sell by date. She was right. I think there are trolley loads of out-of- date tins and jars going around the country doing tombolas. Suspended in a never- land of backs of cupboards, a year at a time, but at least getting to see the world, albeit slowly.