THERE is absolutely no limit to the ingenuity of human beings.  A little over a century ago, flight was an impossible dream.  Scientists watched birds swoop overhead and pondered on the possibility of human flight before dismissing it:  “If God wanted us to fly, He would have created foods that grow in little aluminium containers….” Nowadays millions of people hurtle around, watching the latest films on tiny movie screens, arriving and being processed in humid technological receiving chambers called airport terminals, eating strange food made with very similar ingredients to what you get back home but tasting completely different, sending instant pictures of each other to the folks back home, talking loud and careful English to uncomprehending locals.  And that is just travel.  Take a look at how technology hits us every day.  Medical science, for instance.  When I was little we dreaded a visit to the dentist.  He would give you injections that left you drooling for the rest of the day.  Our particular dentist had a foot-pump-operated drill and an alcohol habit, so you just prayed you got him on a day when he did not have delirium tremens.  Nowadays my kids actively look forward to the dentist:  he is completely painless, makes jokes and hands out sugar-free gum. Food technology is another.  Our food is almost entirely manipulated to stay fresh longer, repel more pests, contain more nutrients, and taste better.  Not to mention that it is almost invariably half-prepared before you get it – take a bow, Woolworths! Our workplace:  we have cars that talk for us, computers that spell for us (not always accurately, I have to mention), Inter-networks that think for us, telephones that, well, that do everything else. Even our entertainment is bigger, better, more advanced, more exciting, more amazing than ever before.  It is completely possible – and quite probable – that you can live your entire life in front on your TV set. But there is one area where mankind falls down completely on the job – and that is packaging. All these things that we own, create, buy or attain have, at some stage, to be packed, and this is where I have millions of examples of the complete failure of the human brain. Let’s start with your luggage.  There are many advisory columns dedicated to the sensible packing of your suitcase:  put your shoes in plastic bags, lay tissue paper between your outfits (puh-lease!), wrap your fragile items in thick layers of clothing.  All sounds good.  But no matter how carefully you pack you are going to find, on arrival, that everything in the suitcase resembles an organic milkshake.  Things that you put on the bottom are now on top – and looking much the worse for wear.  Your shoes managed to get scuffed inside their plastic bags, wads of tissue paper lie torn and forlorn in the corners, and everything is glazed with a thin film of escaped hand cream from the burst bottle.  How come no one has yet managed to invent an expandable system of compartments for the ordinary suitcase? On the other end of the scale, there are those dinky little one-serving sachets that contain everything from tomato sauce to a single-application medicinal dose.  Have you ever tried to open one of these things?  You tear along the indicated line, and all you manage to do is stretch the plastic out of shape.  You use your teeth, and you end up with a mouthful of strange-tasting haemorrhoid cream.  Use a pair of scissors to snip off the corner, and you get a wonderful coloured spots-and-stripes pattern of indelible sauce over your white linen suit. I have some sympathy for that race of people in charge of designing packaging:  they have the unenviable task of making sure that something – usually gooey – has to stay inside the packet without any risk of spill until the consumer needs it.  Then the package is expected conveniently to disintegrate with enough grace to deliver the contents unmessily on to a plate.  It’s not an easy task. But one packaging conundrum I have been unable to understand:  why is it so difficult to unwrap a new toothbrush?   There it is:  a stiff cardboard backing with a clear sheet of hard moulded plastic over it and – the toothbrush inside.  You cannot peel away either the plastic or the cardboard because the two have been cut flush together so you cannot get a grip.  Nothing you do makes any impression on the plastic covering:  it has clearly been designed to withstand the heat and pressure associated with a space-capsule’s return through the stratosphere.  The cardboard is not big enough for you to punch a hole in it with your fingernails and rip it away in pieces.  You cannot cut it open with a saw as you risk damage to the toothbrush inside.  The only option is to chew it, the way Eskimo grandmothers chew leather, till something gives way and you can extract the soggy contents.  This packaging overkill is something I simply cannot understand – the toothbrush is not perishable; the packaging does not appreciably prevent shoplifting; the brush is sturdy enough to withstand transport – so why not use softer plastic, softer cardboard, a perforated backing, or even just a tiny corner where the back or the front can be gripped and peeled away?  Perhaps this is one of those things, like human flight, that we regard as incomprehensible right now, but in a hundred years people will laugh at the difficulties we primitive folk had in getting hold of our toothbrushes.  Unfortunately, though, I don’t think I can wait that long before I next brush my teeth!