Late Stage Capitalism Is A Corkscrew
Jason and I ran away to the seaside last week for a few days of messing about on windswept beaches and a lot of chips.
I took a bottle of wine with me, which is quite unusual these days. I have, by and large, given up drinking. There are several reasons for this:
My body cannot do hurtling into old age, menopause and alcohol at one and the same time. Something has to give and it’s usually painful when it does.
I have discovered in later life that unlike the olden days, when I was generally more robust, that it no longer dulls my anxiety and makes me dance on tables. Mostly it makes me think about all the things that could go wrong (i.e. everything) and then I hide under tables. Weeping floods and blowing my nose vigorously on table cloths.
I have very little power over the connection between my brain and my mouth when I am stone cold sober. When I am drunk, that wafer thin layer of control vaporises like mist and all bets are off. I have no desire to be phoning everyone I came into contact with during one of these episodes with a grovelling apology and some brisk kneeling on pencils to atone for my sins.
So I only tend to drink when I am feeling particularly chipper and the wind is in the east.
Also, since hitting middle age it turns out I rarely give two, hairy fucks about what people think of me, and if I want to dance on tables (which I sometimes very do), I just get up on the table and dance.
All the stars aligned when we were away and I happened to have a toothsome bottle of Nineteen Crimes red about my person, so I dug out the corkscrew in the rental house and went at it with a will.
Five minutes later I was still at it, with considerably less will and a lot more fury.
Jason discovered me, doubled over on the kitchen floor, bottle between my feet and hands clasped around the corkscrew like I was attempting to strangle it. Red of cheek, running with sweat and swearing like Malcolm Tucker after a particularly disastrous press conference.
I find corkscrews to be ornery little buggers, and this one was particularly baffling.
I like the ones that have metal spaniel ears at the side. As you wind the screw into the cork, the ears lift up at a jaunty angle and when you are wedged into the cork sufficiently, you just whale down on the ears and out pops the cork.
Eh voila!
This one had the ears, but they were made of plastic and moulded so that no matter how deep into the corkage you went, they stayed, droopily at the edges of the bottle, looking depressed. And then I was depressed because no matter how much I wiggled and squiggled inside her, no wine was forthcoming and perhaps I died.
At this point I resorted to brute force and a great deal of futile heaving, like I was pulling out the gigantic turnip all by my rown, as Tallulah would say. Only I am a puny turnip puller and nothing was happening to the bottle of wine and everything was happening to me.
By this stage I had gone from wanting a drink to needing a drink so things were increasingly frenzied.
It turns out that you had to finesse the spaniel ears by squeezing them, much like milking a particularly recalcitrant goat.
As I was necking the hard won glass, it led me to think about corkscrews and how come there are such a variety of types when they all do the same thing?
It’s not like wine bottle design has suddenly become more complex over the centuries. If anything, with the invention of wine in a box and screw tops, it has got considerably easier. Yet corkscrews are many, varied and troubling to the innocent puller of corks.
I blame the Victorians.
Pre-Victorian times we all went about utilising minimal cutlery. At one stage we didn’t even bother with forks. What need of a fork when you had a nicely sharpened dagger to stab your hefty victuals with and a ladle for everything runnier?
The Victorians discovered the spinning Jenny, factories, street lighting and late night shopping hot on the heels of each other and then realised that if they were going to lure you into their well lit department store, they needed things to fill it with, because not everyone wanted to be the most well provisioned ladle collector in the western world.
It was a short step from there to grapefruit spoons and having to know which is your butter knife and how to wield a fish knife without giving away your peasant roots.
And it was a hop, skip and a jump from there to me, writhing on the kitchen floor, doing battle with the most stupidly designed corkscrew in the world, cursing variety in all its flavours.