Here’s a policy idea, Rishi: Promise to detach the tops from plastic bottles
There is plenty about modern life to cause celebration and aggravation in equal measure. Thankfully, old hand Christopher Howse and young gun Guy Kelly are here to dissect the way we live now...
If the gent in the top hat had asked Suzon at the bar of the Folies-Bergère for a bottle of Bass, one of those with a red triangle on the label depicted on the marble counter, how would she have served it?
I used to think that the bottles in the painting were sealed with a crown cork – a serrated metal cap holding a cork lining tightly against the top of the bottle neck. But it turns out that crown corks weren’t invented till 1892, when Edouard Manet – the painter of A Bar at the Folies-Bergère – was nine years dead.
So Suzon would not have reached for the bottle opener, but for a corkscrew, removing first the protective capsule of lead or wax (I’m not sure which) and uncorking the pale ale before pouring it into a glass. The bottle would have been mouth-blown (and reused many times), and the cork banged into the bottle with a flogger. A man could cork 200 dozen bottles a day, I read somewhere.
I was surprised when a present-day Suzon asked me if I’d like a glass as she passed me the bottle.
I did not say, ‘Of course I want a glass. What do you take me for?’ That is how my contemporaries might have answered 40 years ago. But I said, ‘Yes, please.’
Naturally we get to think that what we are used to is the right thing. So on a thirsty journey the other week, when I opened a 500ml plastic bottle of water, it seemed wrong that, after a few seconds of tussling, the top remained defiantly attached to the bottle by a tough stalk. After several similar experiences I discovered this was a new policy. It’s to nudge us into recycling the plastic tops of plastic bottles.
More recently, despite my inner outrage at being suspected of drinking from bottles, when I settled down at my desk with no person to see and drank some apple juice from its dumpy plastic bottle, the flapping bottle top made it hard to imbibe without grazing my unobtrusive nose.
If they really wanted to give us a nudge, bottled water would come only in glass bottles, and a national service battalion of a million Suzons would be at hand to pour them out.
It’s funny, the stories that pass you by, as the news cycle churns on its merry way. The celebrities who expire when you were looking in the other direction; the political scandals that take place when you’re on holiday; the viral moments played out while you’re watching a pigeon in the garden.
I had no idea bottle tops had changed at all, but after doing the three weeks of 24/7 research that goes into every one of these columns, it turns out I’ve missed the greatest injustice since Wagon Wheels shrank by 12 per cent.
‘The EU has ruined plastic water bottles,’ wrote The Spectator last month, at the height of attachment-gate. I squinted at a photograph of such a bottle. Couldn’t you just… rotate it so it doesn’t hit you in the face?
No, it turns out, that is not the point. Keeping the top attached so it can all be recycled together was an idea from abroad, and to help the environment, which, in the eyes of The Spectator, means it is not just bad but double bad. ‘Tethered bottle caps promise to become an example of the futility of Brexit,’ the piece continued. Well, we may have had to sacrifice a few scraped schnozzes, but it’s good we can finally all admit that.
The fury has risen above party politics now, though, potentially unifying a riven nation. Consider this view on social media, where people are normally so Zen: ‘At this point I would only vote Tory if they promised bottle tops will not be attached to bottles.’
Could this be the election-winning idea Rishi Sunak has been urging his 23-year-old advisers to look for? Surely even he couldn’t bottle an actual bottle job.
Thinking about it for the first time in my life, I am generally anti-tethering. The pens in banks? Feels cruel, somehow. Oven gloves? Humiliating, especially if you’re ambushed by a hug. Dogs outside newsagents? Pathetic. Boats at anchor? OK, I guess.
Yet try as I might, the bottle caps thing does not raise my blood pressure. Maybe I was just too late to the story. Or perhaps the outraged should try turning the other cheek. That way, at least they won’t scratch their noses.
