Notes from the supermarket - no. 2 in a never-ending series

Incorporating: If anything it’s non-motorists who are discriminated against - no. 1 in an equally never-ending series

I know that I should cut down on my consumption of plastic bags. I try my best, I refuse bags whenever I think I can fit whatever I’m purchasing into my sturdy satchel and I take my bags back to the supermarket for recycling, but I know I should be doing more. The posters say I should be, so it must be true.

The problem is that the posters also say that I should re-use my plastic bags, and yet by the time I’ve got my shopping home the bags I’ve used are usually no good for anything as they’re inevitably riddled with holes. This, I suspect, is because I cram as much as I can into as few bags as possible on the grounds that I have to carry my shopping back to the bus stop in my big manly arms, a walk of around eight minutes largely uphill, and then again up the stairs to my flat. This means that if I did re-use my bags, I would spend even more of my trip back to the bus stop worrying that my shopping would be about to acquaint itself with the pavement at any moment, and I can do without that on a Saturday morning.

(I do wonder whether the apparent flimsiness of plastic bags is because shoppers are assumed not to be lugging their overstuffed bags back to the bus stop, but in fact to be placing their relatively unpopulated bags in a trolley and then wheeling them over to a car boot. I suspect this may be paranoid, but given that whichever genius built the supermarket I do my weekly shopping at decided that he was going to build a road leading straight down to the car park but neglected to include a pavement, hence my having an eight-minute uphill walk back to the bus stop rather than a two minute walk down a straight road, I think my paranoia is slightly more justified than usual.)

I suppose that I could buy some of those sturdy bags that they place temptingly at the checkout, but the problem with those things is that they’re clearly not designed to be used by single men in their early 30s. Oh, so as I get older and more comfortable with myself I find myself caring less and less about what the world might think of me, but I still care enough not to want to carry my shopping home in bags with particularly unpleasant floral patterns on them, thanks awfully.