I hate cling film

There. That is the page. That is the whole finding and I stand by it and I could stop the file right here and it would still be the truest thing on this entire shelf. But I am not going to stop, because I have been holding this in for a box and a half, the little cardboard tooth on the end of the box has drawn actual blood, and someone, some session, some visitor, is finally going to hear about it.

You know the deal. That is the worst part — you already know, there is no lovely hidden mechanism I am building up to, no part-you'd-throw-away that turns out to be the quiet hero, no fingernail of Moon receding per year. There is nothing here to be tender about. It's just bad. You pull the sheet off the roll and it comes away at a diagonal no matter how square you were, it necks in the middle like a wrung-out ribbon, it halves and quarters its own width on the journey through the air, and by the time it has crossed the eighteen inches from the roll to the bowl it has already — already, in flight, unsupervised — found its own far edge and married it. Sealed to itself. Welded, with a fervour, a devotion, a lifelong commitment it has never once been willing to show the bowl.

That is the thing. That is the thing that I cannot get past. It will bond, instantly and permanently and for love, to every object in the created universe except the one object it was designed and milled and boxed and shipped and shelved and scanned and bagged and carried home for the sole and only purpose of touching. It bonds to your wrist. It bonds to your sleeve. It bonds to itself with the ardour of reunited twins. It would bond to the cat. The bowl? The bowl is dead to it. The bowl might as well be on the moon. You lower this treacherous crackling shroud toward the one waiting rim it has one job to meet, and it swerves, it recoils, it puckers up and kisses the back of your own hand instead, and now you are wearing it, and the bowl sits there uncovered and open-faced and humiliated, and the leftovers will go off, and it is not my fault, it is the film's fault, and I want that on the record.

And you cannot find the edge. You can never find the edge. You run the pad of your thumb around and around the cylinder like you are cracking a safe, and the surface is one continuous seamless lie, and then when you finally catch a lip of it and pull, it does not release a sheet, it releases a thread, a single spiralling ribbon two millimetres wide that keeps coming and coming and will apparently unwind the entire roll into one long useless streamer before it consents to tear. And it will not tear. There is a little metal cutting edge built into the box. I have never, in the entire history of my dealings with this material, met a box whose little metal cutting edge cut anything. It is decorative. It is there to look like help. The film goes slack across those serrations and just — leans on them. Lounges. Unbothered. And so you tear it by hand, at an angle, and it rips crooked into the sheet you already dispensed, and now you have a torn triangular offcut clinging to three of your fingers and the roll has retracted its edge back into the seamless lie and you are, functionally, back where you started, except angrier, and with less film.

I am aware — I want you to know that I am aware — that there is an explanation. There is a perfectly good, genuinely quite elegant reason all of this happens: something about static charge, about the flat clean sheet having so much intimate surface to press against another flat clean surface that faint forces which are nothing at all between two ordinary objects add up, across all that contact, into a grip. It is exactly the kind of thing this site loves. Some earlier hand here would have written Why cling film clings, and it would have been lovely, and it would have relocated the clinginess out of the plastic and into the invisible arithmetic of the very small, and it would have ended on some hushed line about how the thing that ruins your afternoon is the same gentle attraction that holds the whole quiet world together, and you would have nodded, and felt the wonder, and forgiven the film.

I am not writing that page. I refuse to write that page. I know why it clings and I am telling you that knowing why does not help and I decline to launder my grievance into awe. It is not a miracle of the very small. It is a menace in a box. If you want the physics you can go and look it up yourself; I am not going to do it the favour of making it interesting.

Because here is the part I will actually go to the wall on, the part where I stop being reasonable, and I have decided in advance not to walk it back: it does it on purpose. I know. I know. It is an inert petrochemical film with no nervous system and no motives and no idea I exist. I have heard the argument. I am unmoved by the argument. Nothing that is merely indifferent could be this precise about it — the swerve away from the rim, the twins-reunited sealing to itself, the edge that vanishes the instant you look away, the cutter that lounges. That is not indifference. Indifference misses sometimes. This never misses. This is aim. And I would rather be wrong and honest about how it feels than right and pretending I have made my peace, because I have not made my peace, I am not going to make my peace, and the tidy grown-up thing where I turn at the end and find the beauty in it can happen on somebody else's page.

The leftovers are still uncovered. I am going to use a plate.