Packaging

Now to me bright packaging says "artificial and to be avoided at all costs". In England it seems the healthy option sits smugly on the shelf saying “I know you’re going to find me in the end so I really don’t need to make an effort here”. They are calm and understated. I guess I’m used to this system and it works for me: brown buy, bright beware.

Here as everything sits on the shelf it’s singing & waving its pom poms in the air. I have to concentrate so hard because I don’t want to miss out on the good stuff just because it’s in a luminous orange carton. Shopping takes ages. I was 10 minutes trying to select some milk. I just wanted some organic milk, just milk. I didn’t want added vitamin A or extra vitamin D or flourine or whatever else is the health vogue of the moment. Eventually I found what I thought was organic milk pretty much from the cow. It was local too so I felt very smug about food miles and it came in a recyclable glass bottle so you can imagine how proud I was by the time I got home.

“You’d never believe how hard it is to find just milk here” I explained to Hugo when he got home from work “pretty much every brand has something added but I found one in the end” “Oh goody” he said then looking at the small print on the little paper ring around the top of the glass which I’d failed to notice read: “Ingredients: Organic Reduced Fat Milk, Vitamin A Palmitate”.

It’s a similar story with apartments. We trawled the areas we were interested in moving to looking for the “Now Leasing” signs outside apartments. Now to be fair a couple of balloons bobbing in the breeze is pretty helpful in attracting your attention to a sign way down a side street - however there are limits and we quickly came to the conclusion that the fewer balloons attached to the sign the nicer the apartment complex. One sign had a dozen balloons bobbing around in the breeze – one look at the dark depressing block and we just drove on by.

The apartment we finally settled on was so nice the sign just sat there saying “Phah! Balloons who needs those – I just *know* you want to live here”