I’ve always been quite deft with my fingers, right from my Girl Guide reef-knotting days, but lately I seem to be all thumbs while opening packages. It must be one of the many challenges of aging nobody tells you about. From bottles and sachets, soap dispensers and AAA batteries, daily life is fraught with packaged challenges.

What is mystifying is the unpredictability of it all. The amount of strength required (whether Herculean, Lilliputian or anywhere in-between) to open a jam jar, for instance. A delicate twist of the wrist may suffice, but equally, it may turn out to be your morning workout. Or take the juice cartons which, in their eagerness to please, almost invariably spill half their contents on you even with a gentle tug. Similarly, there is no fool-proof, time-tested strategy for opening those tiny single-use sachets of sauce or those tinier sachets of dairy whitener which shower their powdery, sticky contents everywhere but in the cup that needs it. It’s pretty much a trial-and-error technique – what works once may not work again.

Even with clear-cut instructions, success may not be yours. Take my struggle with a seemingly innocuous bottle of a liquid soap dispenser. Press and twist. Simple and lucid. I’ve done it many times over. I did so again. Nothing budged. I tried again. An ankylosed joint would respond better. My daughter saw me wrestling and came to the (dispenser’s) rescue. I waited for the pitying look that the young reserve for such moments. This time though, it didn’t materialise. It took ten minutes of pressing, twisting, pushing (accompanied by a string of verbal incantations), before the battle was won.

I needed a bar of chocolate to replenish my depleted energy stores. I held the edges of the wrapper in the prescribed technique and pulled… and pulled. The objects in my house seemed to have joined forces, a clear case of collective resistentialism. Not all the negative forces of the universe combined, however, can come between me and a bar of dark chocolate (especially when fortified with whole roasted almonds). Aided by snip of the loyal kitchen scissors, the win was quick and decisive!

Online shopping poses fresh challenges when it comes to opening packages. You have to run the gauntlet of multiple layers of packaging to get to your object of desire. The first line of defence are the yards of black adhesive tape along the perimeter. The makers of the said sticky tape have outdone themselves – their slogan, I believe, is “Stick to It“. And so it does. To your fingers, your clothes, the furniture, to itself, to the carton and finally to the wastepaper basket. ‘As tenacious as adhesive tape’ might well be the new metaphor.

Once the house of card(board) is infiltrated, and you run through the loosely stuffed brown paper and bubble wrap and you’re congratulating yourself, you see that the product you ordered comes in its personalised armoured packaging, designed specifically to stop everyone from getting to it. Manufacturers seem to believe firmly in the policy of delayed gratification. Shirts come folded and pinned at the cuffs, collars, shoulders, sleeves, and other unforeseen sites, pricklier than hedgehogs; toothbrushes come stiffly sandwiched between contoured plastic with a warning which could read – ‘what machines have moulded together let no man pull asunder’; and electronic goods come wrapped in more layers of PPE than doctors in Covid wards.

I confess I’ve been defeated by Operation Opening Packages. My self-esteem is at an all-time low; I am battle-scarred (chipped nails and scratches) ; even my weaponry is blunted. I had to order a new set of paper-cutters and scissors to replenish my armamentarium. They arrived yesterday. Guarded between layers of stiff moulded plastic. One hundred percent tamperproof, the manufacturers proudly assert.