Tupperware times...

Tupperware, what was all the excitement about? After all, would you go to a party to buy empty plastic containers? Rooms full of over excited women sipping sweet and warm Spanish white gazing longingly at pastel coloured plastic bowls and paying ridiculous prices for pretty much the same thing that Indian takeaways are delivered in these days.

Back in the seventies I had a girlfriend whose mum had the biggest collection of Tupperware you can imagine. She had everything: small containers, large containers, plates, bowls, tumblers, jugs, lemon squeezers, jelly moulds, sandwich boxes, a salt and pepper set, even a tall, slim, cereal container with a flip-open lid and a pourer. She had them in every washed-out insipid colour you can imagine from pink to blue, mint green to yellow, and an unhealthy looking not-quite-white.

My girlfriend’s mum would proudly display her Tupperware on every available shelf and surface in her dark-brown Hessian fronted kitchen cupboards. Containers for flour, coffee, tea, sugar, rice, biscuits, and salt sat in neat lines at the back of her cream tiled work-surfaces next to her Tupperware breadbin. Her freezer was full with Tupperware containers, from tiny to tub-size, all neatly labelled with contents and date and filled with the frozen watery vegetables that her husband grew on his all too-regimented allotment.

She was the Queen of Tupperware, all horn-rimmed glasses, tweed skirt, high-permed not-quite-a-beehive rinsed brown hair and a mouth so thin you’d have struggled to slip a sheet of greaseproof paper between her lips. She spent her mornings cooking tasteless meals to a strict budget and cleaning, her afternoons reading second-rate romance novels, and her evenings (if she was very lucky) at Tupperware parties at one of her identical neighbour’s houses.

Barbara and Brian Grace, or ‘Mr and Mrs respectable average’ as I used to call them. Tupperware people leading Tupperware lives in a Tupperware world. I didn’t like them and they didn’t like me. In retrospect it was all a little bit too ‘Stepford Wives’. Long, long ago now, of course.

I had thought Tupperware a thing of the past, long gone like smoking in the office, hot pants, the Rubik’s cube, and Ira Levin. Not so, it’s still out there, doing well, and on sale in over 100 countries.

Party anyone?