Friday 11 June 2010

Goodbye Tupperware

You try to ignore bad news stories - or at least I do (descended from a long and illustrious line of ostriches on my paternal grandfather's side [hem hem]). 'I'm not thinking about that,' I tell myself as some horrible image appears on the telly, 'it's too awful.' And I imagine I've been successful, that I've stuffed the information out of sight, suppressed any memory of the latest ghastly thing. Fantasy, of course - it's never really gone. It's just been shoved into the background, stashed away in the shadows. Most of the time I'm not aware of it. That doesn't matter. It still lingers, niggling away beneath the other rubbishy activity that passes for thinking in what - for want of a better word - I like to call my mind.

Which is why, the day before yesterday, in the middle of Henry IV Part 1 at the Globe (and I don't care if people say it's corny and touristy, I love that place [despite the terrible tabarded army of jobs-worths who act as ushers and take enormous pleasure in trying to spoil each performance for as many people as they possibly can {perhaps they've got some game going or get rewarded for being annoying - one spent 15 minutes right behind me very slowly and noisily rolling up her cellophane plastic mac during a particularly crucial part of the play, rustle, rustle, rustle, rustle, rustle , rustle, aaaaaaaargh}]) when Roger Allam (as always, he is brilliant - although the rest of the production is a bit patchy and the interpretation of Hotspur is downright odd) as Falstaff took a small horn container from his leather bag, removed the horn lid and began eating the contents with a horn spoon, I felt a sudden sense of relief.

'All those hoofs and horns we're wasting,' I thought, 'they could be put to such good use - horn water bottles, horn yoghurt pots, horn lunch boxes, the possibilities are endless. No more plastic, so no need for half the oil we use. Which means we won't have to drill in the oceans any more so there won't be accidents and I won't have to try not to think about all those poor oil-clogged birds I thought I'd managed to suppress. And the unemployed could be given nice satisfying jobs fashioning all the horn receptacles and we meat eaters would be able to sneer at vegetarians as despoilers of the planet, with their refusal to help provide a supply of horn resulting in the need for more and more petro-chemical intensive plastics.'

Such a visionary, Shakespeare - and, what is more, obviously the world's first Green.

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