One of our editor's daughter Paulina , is good at questioning things – apart from her self-diagnosed “vegetablephobia”, symptoms of which often appear at lunchtime. In any case, after Christmas, she turned her budding powers of observation on her father’s plastics industry after seeing a story about plastics waste in the oceans. “Dad, is that your plastic?” she inquired. “I don’t want anything to do with that!”

What followed was the popular family quiz time, a hybrid of education and entertainment. The beloved old Christmas tree decorations: Glass? Metal? No, plastic! The piano? Lots of plastic. The chemistry set under the tree, the princess castle? Plastic and plastic. The new winter shoes, the doll, the covers of your beloved books? They all contain plastics.

Frustrated and nagging, she reaches for homemade Christmas cookies. “But they’re not made of plastic, are they?” she asks cheekily. When her father holds a cookie cutter in front of her nose, she finally grumbles and sighs: “OK. So no cookies without plastic….”