… open a carton of fruit juice, retrieve pills from within a blister pack, or pour from a carton of milk without a tethered cap. Not anymore. It might be that I am becoming weaker by the day, but I’m having problems performing these three tasks.

Take the fruit juice carton. This particular carton has a lever-up style of opening. I find this very difficult to do. I can just about get my index finger under the catch, but it takes enormous effort to break the seal, so much so that I usually resort to using a kitchen knife or similar as a lever.

I have much the same problems with the earlier ring-pull design. I can fit only my little finger through the ring pull – every other finger is too thick – and, as with the lever technique, breaking the cap from its seal requires considerable physical strength and care to avoid spilling half the contents on my pure white shirt. A pair of pliers or a metal skewer sorts that problem out.

I just want a glass of cranberry juice not preceded by a feat of digital agility and strength!

And what’s happened to pill blister packs? I used to be able to pop out a paracetamol pill using just my thumbnail and pushing with moderate pressure. Not anymore. I try every which way to break the foil seal but usually end up either twisting the pack through 90° at least and, if successful at popping the foil, discovering the pill inside is now an assortment of small fragments.

These days, I use a sharp blade to cut two incisions through the foil on the longer side of each compartment before pushing from the front. That works!

As for the recent addition of a tethered cap on cartons of milk, who on earth thought this might be a good idea? In the good old days, I just screwed the cap off and placed it gently in a prominent spot, ready to reseal the carton after use. Clearly, someone decided that too many caps were being lost during usage and engineered the tethered cap. The problem is that when you pour from the carton, the dangling cap interrupts the flow, and the liquid contents go anywhere except into the receiving vessel. Digital dexterity is now required to hold the cap away from the flow while pouring, which is fine if you don’t have arthritis or any other digital agility limitation.

Detaching the cap from its tether using a pair of kitchen scissors is my solution to this problem.

And don’t get me started on can openers (twist key, lever type, rotating wheel; manual or electric?), corkscrews (key, pocket, wing, lever?), potato peelers (swivel, straight, Y?), 4-in-1 bottle and jar openers, or those gadgets that are supposed to sharpen steel carving knives and ceramic kitchen knives but never do!

Bert and Mavis cartoon.
For more Bert and Mavis cartoons, see Bert and Mavis: The First Fifty Cartoons

(^_^)