Instagram is so annoying these days, don’t you think? I used to love scrolling. Vast swathes of my life swilled down the plughole as I gazed at my friends’ handmade ceramics and cottage gardens and lunches set out at a beachside restaurant in Greece.
Remember those golden times, when it was all static pictures? When you could open the app, reasonably certain that someone wasn’t going to start shouting and brandishing a product at you? It’s all ads now - of women holding up beauty products to camera. Instagram knows I’m a sucker for a fancy moisturiser, a pushover for the Laura Mercier counter staff in a beauty hall - and that I once thought about trying a red lipstick in 1996. So, the beauty ads - I get that.
But recently Instagram has started to confuse me with someone else. Specifically, someone who is interested in cleaning. Feeling stressed, overworked and ill tempered - Instagram is my default action for those times. On I hop, forgetting for a moment that there won’t be static images of terracotta pots of pansies clustered around my friend’s charming front door. I won’t see Cathy’s craft shed or Gayle and Esther on a Turkish beach. I’ll see someone shouting about a surface cleaner with fragrance of lime and mint! Toilet germ killer that powers though limescale! Magic dust repellent!
This is literally 99% of what I see these days. People squirting and scrubbing and wiping and mopping - not to cut through grease or remove unsightly stains but to ramp up my hormonal malaise.
I realise what’s happening here. That Instagram knows my cleaning standards are, shall we say, not especially high. That I clean out of necessity, when people are coming over. That, if enough of these ads are thrown at me, they will eventually tap into my shame over the crumbs that lurk under the sofa and in the floorboard cracks.
Then one day, among all the cleaning stuff a random item pops up.
THE CRIMPIT. Do you know what a Crimpit is? It’s this:
A little plastic gizmo you lay your wrap onto, and then your fillings, and then you close the Crimpit and it crimps the edges together, thus sealing them. And of course, once it’s found me on Instagram it’s got me on Facebook too. I find myself being drawn in, watching the speeded up video of the wrap laid flat on the open Crimpit, and the ingredients being dropped on…
…And then the climax - what I believe used to be called ‘the money shot’ in old fashioned pornography - the crimping. I have a book to write in an extremely short timescale so naturally I watch this about 17 times.
And it sort of burrows into my brain.
Instead of figuring out what should happen in chapter 23, I start thinking about the kinds of wraps I could make, if I had a Crimpit.
If I buy one without consultation, I know it’ll just be roundly mocked and then flung in a drawer. It’s crucial that my family is on board with this domestic innovation.
So I force my husband to watch the video. ‘It’s “only” fifteen quid!’ I announce.
‘We don’t need that,’ he says.
I try my daughter, thinking she will be easier prey. ‘We don’t need it,’ she says.
Now, whenever I go onto Facebook - again, forgetting it’s not the old days, and hoping to see my friends’ pets, gardens and tasteful interiors - all I see are Crimpits.
I go onto the Oliver Bonas website, lured by sparkly knitwear and party dresses which I certainly don’t need, but very much want - and there is a version of the Crimpit ‘For Thins’.
Every time I make myself a wrap for lunch, I think: would this be better properly crimped? Yes, is the answer!
A young person tells me in passing that there’s a movement now to come off Instagram, and even Tik Tok - in fact social media altogether. They’re disillusioned, she tells me. Sick of being bombarded with ads and their free time being suckered away.
I think young people are savvy to do this. They’ve just had enough. Whereas we gnarly old boomers are still hanging on in there - gullible, easily parted with our cash. Believing that a piece of useless plastic would transform our lives forever. If only we could get the family on board.
I try my husband again. ‘Think of all the things we could do with a Crimpit!’
I explain that, while £15 seems steep for a semi-circle of yellow plastic, we’d actually save money by owning one. We’d never again buy a shop-bought wrap. We’d never throw away poorly-assembled home made wraps - torn wrap, filling tumbling out - and we’d avoid the ill temper created by such scenarios.
It would be fun, I tell him. Entertaining, even. We could get it out when friends come round and demonstrate our nifty crimping. We could crimp, crimp, crimp, instead wasting our lives by mindlessly scrolling—
‘No,’ he says, ‘we’d just stick it in a drawer with all the other useless pieces of crap.’
I hate it when he’s right. But I still want one.
Love,
Fiona xx
PS Ever get that bathroom window feeling? In my new novel, The Woman Who Ran Away From Everything, Kate has had enough of cooking and cleaning and all the rest - and once she’s escaped through the bathroom window there’s no going back. It’s a tiny 99p in ebook just now - you can order here!
DON'T DO IT!!
I too battled with the temptation for weeks, then I unexpectedly earned a little extra money and decided I deserved a little treat. I bought it and I can sadly advise that it has not been the life changing experience I expected. I've used it twice and both times the edges remained steadfastly unsealed resulting in a lunch that was way messier than if I had just rolled the wraps myself.
BUY IT!!!