Plastic fantastic

It's a shock to discover today that a slender, slightly bendy box with a brilliantly tight-fitting lid, which lives in our kitchen cupboard, is about to turn into a rare lifestyle icon.

Humdrum but tirelessly practical and useful, it's an example of 1960s original Tupperware, the miracle product whose pioneering 'party sales' system is to end in Britain, with the loss of 1700 jobs.

I was there, as a puzzled teenager, when the box was bought by my mum, at a party in otherwise respectable Weetwood on the northern side of Leeds. At the age of 16 and in the 1960s, you never said no to a party invitation, but this one was entirely different from all the others.

Over tea in a nice lady's lounge (a word itself redolent of the Tupperware world) we sat and caressed an amazing variety of the semi-transparent boxes, cups and jars. Available in pastel shades as well as the workmanlike greyish-white which we selected (as a good, straightforward Methodist household), they were suggestive of the much more exciting housewife sales that were to come, notably in the underwear field.

I never attended any of those (neither did mum) but it was fascinating for a teenage boy to see the excitement aroused by very workaday kitchen objects. We came from a world of Kilner jars and Tizer bottles with those spring-loaded stoppers (explosions were a regular part of our picnics.)

Physically and scientifically, I don't think that Tupperware ever had anything to teach us. But the party notion - American, of course, but genuinely pioneering in Britain - made you suspend belief. The lady with the lounge pouring tea into Tupperware picnic mugs really did seem to be onto something.

How exciting, too, that someone in the United States had zeroed in on little old Weetwood, like a spaceperson descending with all sorts of extra-terrestrial gizmos. We didn't go to many more parties, mostly because my parents' kitchen was already full of boxes.

One of my greatgrandfathers had been a herbalist in Leeds and we inherited a fine collection of airtight tins with fantastic names - Mandragora, Jubilee Weed, even, as I recall, C.Sativa - painted on them in curling letters.

The Tupperware, frankly, also didn't look very nice. It had - still has - that dull, matt texture that leaves you slightly uncertain about whether or not it is clean. But the long, thin box has genuinely been one of the most valuable items in my own domestic armoury. It happens to be exactly the right size for a high school pupil's packed lunch. Only the drinks cartoon is a little too wide; but the amazing grip of the Tupperware lid means that you can squash it in safely. Never a spillage.

One of our sons is now at university and the other on his gap year. So, like the UK's Tupperware parties, the 35-year-old container is facing redundancy. Today's news, however, has changed things. It will now become a shrine.

As people who never throw anything away, we have as many Precious Things in our house as Edward and Tubbs had in the League of Gentlemen's shop. The most precious will be transferred to our Tupperware Casket and kept for ever on the lounge mantelpiece.