There is nothing as unsexy or as repugnant as cling film. It is perverse. Unwrapping a sandwich or a piece of fruit cake from cling film is tantamount to languidly masturbating in a fountain, in a busy public park, on a Sunday.
As far as I’m concerned you may as well be squeezing a piece of soggy bread from a condom when removing a food stuff from its clingy filmy folds. To then offer up the contents to someone is like asking them to pick a dolly mixture from a steaming turd or pluck a yellow jelly baby from a pile of vomit. I may have wrapped the tastiest treat, the rarest of morsels plucked from some obscure larder in a far-flung locale, in cling film but I would not dream of offering it to even my closest friend because of how it looks, because of how it now is.
I also associate cling film with people shoving little packages of shrink-wrapped narcotics up their bottoms – appetising. Fair enough if you are a drug mule trying to avoid rotting away in some Mexican prison but to protect and transport food – oh no, no fucking way.
Also, I once cut myself on the metal teeth of an industrial cling film dispenser. It hurt. The tiny teeth ripped the flesh of my thumb with total ease, something it had never once managed to do to cling film, ever. In fact, every cling film dispenser I have ever used has only been good at one thing – making twisted little cling film sculptures to physically repulse me.
The other day I was on a train and a man was staring beyond me and out of the window. His face didn’t convey it, but I imagined he was enjoying the melting landscape, the stream of greens giving way to concrete hues and back again. The occasional cow or horse, irrelevant punctuation to the novella of his journey. As he stared, I continued to eat my sandwiches that I had minutes before and with much shame removed from a piece of cling film. Despite the embarrassment of eating out of cling film in public, I was too hungry to care. Then I realised that the man was not staring out of the window but at me. He was staring disgustedly at the crumb-filled cling film in my lap. I quickly squeezed it into a ball and pushed it in my pocket but it never went away. Not for the whole journey.
In light of this, I have decided that tin foil is the way forward. Tin foil is manly. It reminds me of stories I heard as a child of people salvaging foil from forests in the war so that bombs or guns or some such killing thing could be made. Winston Churchill probably liked it. Tin foil is useful. It is not perverse. I like tin foil.
