No. 1 Shopping Bags

Yesterday I had the pleasure of searching through the spare cupboard, amongst the toolboxes and assorted knick-knacks that see fit to gather there as though awaiting the second coming of the toolshed messiah; looking for a Phillips screwdriver with which to perform one of the mundane tasks that crop up every so often and make this life so rewarding, when I came across something that A) I hadn’t expected to find; and B) hadn’t seen such a sterling example of in a good long while.

A shopping bag.

Yes, you heard me right. A humble shopping bag that the wife had somehow acquired and saw fit to stash amongst the assembled worshippers of the church of DIY.

Now before you consider ringing for the men in the white coats, let me clear one thing up. I’m not on about a crinkled polythene carrier bag, the type you spend half an hour at the supermarket checkout trying to open, only for it to break on the way to the carpark because you’ve overfilled it in a bid to avoid the embarrassment and shame of having to try and wrestle another open. No, my fine beauties, I’m on about a real, honest to god shopping bag – the type that was commonplace when I was a lad.

Well I say ‘honest to god’, but further investigation discovered there was witchcraft at play here.

The shopping bag was in fact Asda’s own, branded with their logo and constructed from what looked to have once been a hessian sack. It also bore the legend:

Love the environment, love this bag. Billions of carrier bags go to landfill every year – so let’s make a change.

Erm… excuse me mister Asda, but who exactly was that aimed at?

As I’ve already said, shopping bags were once everywhere; moms had them, nans had them… If you were female and old enough to legally bear children, you had a shopping bag. It predated Chavettes and Jane Norman bags (more of a shop- lifting than a shop- ping bag) by decades.

It was the rise of your mega multi-conglomerate supermarkets, such as Asda and Tesco (who’re never slow to leap upon a passing bandwagon) that put an end to the distinguished shopping bag and replaced it with the common-or-garden disposable variety, coming soon to a street corner near you.

The supermarkets with their ‘Everything in one place’ philosophy, easily accessible carparks, and fiercely undercut prices.

Mister Asda, it’s you and your supermarket cronies that spurred the growth in the polythene bag industry. For every bag that’s now clogging up a landfill site, refusing to die, or dancing with the wind on one of Britain’s grey streets, just waiting to entangle itself around the intestine of an innocent puppy – It’s you that’s to blame!

Now, I’m all for the return of proper shopping bags, their demise is mirrored by the general downturn this once fine land has undergone. I mean, I miss the days when moms throughout the land would trudge from shop to shop, through hail, wind, rain and snow, dumping everything into said bag without a care, so that when they got home there was a readymade omelette seeping out the bottom.

But I want these days to return on our terms. Not yours Mister Asda-man. Your environmental concern doesn’t wash with this lad. Not a jot.

You’re the ones that ballsed up the environment. So don’t try making us feel guilty about it!

“Billions of carrier bags go to landfill every year – so let’s make a change” – I ask you!

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