Are there 100 minutes of laughs to be had from secret santas, bowls of crisps, plastic cups of warm white wine and furtive snogs in the stationery cupboard?
I suspect much of our reluctance to make packed lunches stems from traumatic childhood experiences – memories of spillages (luckily, Tupperware has come a long way in recent years), crushed crisps and plastic-clad oblongs of sweaty Cheddar.
And a stamp for every time you are there on a gloomy day, and when you have 10 stamps, you have earned the right to be there on a nice day, and to enjoy it without having to wade through discarded crisp packets and plastic carriers and beer bottles and rubbish bagged up but then abandoned.
With no electricity, cables or satellites, let alone service providers and all the rest of the digital panopoly, the iPad's screen would remain resolutely dark, its crisp and gleaming plastic and metal case holding little interest for the architects of the Great Pyramid of Cheops or Salisbury Cathedral.
MSI WIND U120 ($330) The MSI Wind's clean, simple, black-and-white design embraces crisp "folds" in its plastic rather than the rounded edges of its rivals.
You can freeze the baked apple crisp well wrapped in plastic wrap.
As a small boy, my nephew would often wear in public a favorite green "hat" that was in fact a plastic lettuce crisper.
She associated it vaguely with a windy walk across pale pebbles that were awkward underfoot, along the sea's rim of crisp-dried detritus: seaweed, plastic netting, bird bones.
Had the children's librarian there, Mrs. Fluckiger, really once called out to me, when I entered, "Hello there, Meg, I put aside a Madeleine L'Engle I thought you might like!"? Had the shelves really been larded with interesting new books and beloved classics, all of them in shockingly good condition, the pages crisp, the covers shining with plastic?
