Why the packet seems fine

Before I argue with the run, I want to be fair to it, because the reasons for it are ordinary and the people who do it aren't gluttons.

It's a snack. Not a meal, not a binge. A bag of crisps on the sofa after dinner is one of life's small permitted things, and a book about it can seem to be making a fuss.

You'll just have a few. That's the intention, every time, and it's sincere. You're not opening the bag to finish it. You're opening it for the taste, and a few would do.

It's open now. Once the bag is open, it's a different object. An unopened bag can sit in the cupboard for a month. An open one is a thing in progress.

It'd go stale. Crisps left open go soft by morning. Finishing the bag is thrift, not greed.

You deserve it. The day was long and this is the bit of it that's yours, and the crisps are part of that.

Everyone does it. Sharing bags are the normal size now. The whole country is on a sofa with one open.

It's what the evening is for. The day was demands, and the sofa is where nobody asks anything of you, and the bag is part of that, and a book about the bag can feel like one more demand arriving at the one hour that had none.

And the taste. Crisps are good. That's not a belief, it's a fact about crisps, and a book that pretends otherwise isn't worth reading.

There are needs under all of this. A small pleasure at the end of a day. Not to waste things. Not to fuss. Those are reasonable, and the method later in the book meets them, because the method keeps the crisps and the sofa and the programme. What I'll show is that the run doesn't give you the pleasure you opened the bag for. It gives you the first ten crisps, which were the pleasure, and then a hundred and forty you didn't taste, and the bottom, and a feeling. The intention to have a few was a good intention. It was the packet that didn't cooperate.