LAST Sunday was a beautiful afternoon up on Barningham Moor. All Teesdale was spread out before us and the sun shone down on us from a brilliant blue sky streaked only by contrails.

There were only a couple of tractors chugging along the quiet lanes of Teesdale, but in the sky there was a superhighway. Plenty of planes ploughed through the atmosphere, the water vapour in the exhaust cooling quickly and condensing momentarily into water droplets which, just 50 metres from the plane, freeze into a trail of ice crystals.

These condensation trails, white and fluffy, look rather pretty from green and grassy Teesdale. Contrails have always intrigued me. Looking up, imagining all those happy people going on holidays, just a thin piece of metal between them and a seven mile drop. Imagining where they were going to - how can so many planes head north over Barnard Castle? How big is Iceland's tourist industry?

But intrigue no more. For the day before, we were among them. A contrail was marking our progress homeward from holiday. And now, as I stood beneath Teesdale's wide open skies, all I could think of was packaging.

Firstly, suitcases. Our last suitcase fell to bits last year on the carousel home. So we bought a new one. "It'll last you a lifetime," said the shop assistant. It cost over £100, and came with all sorts of locks and devices "to keep your property secure and to guarantee piece of mind".

But as I was securing all the combo codes, I realised that nothing inside was worth more than the suitcase. In fact, all the pants, T-shirts, trunks combined were not worth as much as the suitcase itself. If I had really wanted to protect my valuables, I should have tied my shirts and smalls around the case so that no shifty baggage handler could see how costly it was.

Secondly, more seriously, airline food. Seven items individually packaged in throwaway plastic. The dessert came from Leeds; the crackers from Liverpool via London where they were vacuum packed with the cheese from France. We flew from Manchester.

Look out of the plane window. You see all these antlike lorries crawling around the motorways. What can they all be carrying? Individual bits of airline food, of course. In fact, a lorry is setting off now from the paper napkin factory to the plastic cutlery factory on to the salt factory via the pepper factory and then to the printing place so that all the bits can be wrapped at the plastic packaging plant in time for us to dine on next year's holiday flight.

The sturdy plastic knife and fork are each 16cms long. The dessert spoon is 12cms long. The teaspoon, should I take sugar, is 10cms long. Total: 54cms. That's more than half-a-metre of one-use-if-it's-lucky plastic per person.

Now, three billion meals are consumed on planes every year. We'll take 54cms as an average, even though ours was a low-cost airline and you're bound to get more plastic aboard, say, British Airways.

That makes 1.016 million miles of cutlery floating over our heads every year. The moon is only 238,855 miles away. All the airline cutlery laid end to end would reach it four-and-a-quarter times.

Then we'd be able to find out if the moon were made of cheese. If it were, it would be a damn sight tastier than that from France vacuum-packed in London with crackers from Liverpool spread with butter from Somerset and half-eaten on a flight out of Manchester over the Bay of Biscay.

Published: ??/??/2005