The bottom of the bag

It's half past eight and you're on the sofa with a programme on. You've had dinner. You fancy something, and there's a sharing bag of crisps in the cupboard, so you open it, and the first one is exactly what you wanted. Salt and crunch and the taste you'd been thinking of. You have another. The programme goes on. Your hand goes to the bag and back, and to the bag and back, and you're not thinking about crisps, you're thinking about the programme, and then your hand goes in and there's nothing there, and you look down, and it's the bottom.

A hundred and fifty grams. You'd have said, an hour ago, that you wanted a handful. You'd have been telling the truth. What happened between the handful and the bottom wasn't a decision. It was a hand, a bag and a screen, and it's happened three times this week.

Or it's the bag of sweets in the car door, opened at the lights and empty by the motorway. Or the tub of nuts on the counter that you passed six times and now can see the bottom of. Or the biscuits, or the popcorn, or whatever your packet is. The shape is the same. An intention to have a few, a container that doesn't stop, and a surprise at the end that you'd think would stop being a surprise by now and doesn't.

These are invented, but I'd guess yours is close. Some words. I'll call whatever the snack came in the packet, whether it's a bag, a tub or a box. The first crisp, the one you actually wanted, is the first one. The empty packet is the bottom. Eating from the first one to the bottom without deciding to, I'll call the run. A portion you've served yourself is the bowl. The automatic movement from packet to mouth is the hand. Whatever's on while you eat is the screen. Anything that breaks a quantity into decided amounts, a bowl, a small bag, a clip, I'll call a partition, which is a researchers' term I'll credit in chapter 8. And the amount that feels like the right amount, without anyone deciding it, I'll call the unit, which is another.

Before you go on, do one thing. For a week, keep a list. Every packet you open, write down what it was, roughly how big, whether a screen was on, and whether you reached the bottom. Don't change anything. Most people who do this find that the bottom was reached nearly every time a screen was on and a sharing bag was open, and almost never when the snack was in a bowl. That's the whole book in a week of notes, and you'll believe it more from your own handwriting than from me.