The Monday Carton

‘Dear friend! Lovely day! Glad to hear that you're in the market for cartons…’

This was the first email in my inbox this morning and it made from grim reading. Needless to say, I’m not in the market for cartons. I’ve never been in the market for cartons. For some inexplicable reason, cartons don’t excite me on a Monday morning.  Oh, you could say that I’m just a carton denier or perhaps I’ve never been with the right carton. You could even argue that I must have some deep latent love for cartons that I’d want to blog about it. Perhaps this email exposes the great carton lie I tell myself every single day.

‘Damn it, man!’ you should cry, while grabbing my lapels and slapping me around my face. Yes, you would need at least three hands to do that but you’re gifted and you like to make your important points impressively. ‘There’s nothing wrong with a man expressing his love for cartons. Some of the greatest men in history have been secretly in the market for cartons. What about Gladstone, Ghandi, Ulysses S. Grant? Nobody looks on them differently because they enjoyed the company of slatternly cartons. There’s nothing wrong with expressing your love for a good carton once in while.’

And indeed there is not. And perhaps if the circumstances were right, I would be in the mood for cartons. Perhaps dressed seductively, their pouting cardboard lips irresistible, they would be irresistible and I would succumb, possibly up to three times a night and sometimes even rinsing them out. And frankly, given my recent luck, I might have a better chance if I was I’d gone in for some carton competitions, rather than cartoons.

But alas, for the carton producers of China's Hebei province, this will have to remain my secret. Perhaps one day the world will be ready for a man to express openly his love for a carton but until that happy day, these emails will have to be stored in a safe place, such as the trash folder.