Boy, you have to carry that weight

I’ll wade in many others about this. My one new year resolution towards a greener planet. To no longer accept plastic bags from supermarkets.

A few years ago I had a holiday in Morroco. Those of you who have done similarly may know where this is leading. I was delighted to hear that a colleague of mine had been to that same country to experience the souks, mosques, colour and exotica that comes from visiting another culture in another country and in another continent.

I asked her what was her impression was of that place. Her immediate response was not one that would grace the travelogues. It was the amount of black plastic bags that were everywhere. I had no hesitation but to agree that black plastic bags were everywhere. No, they were not everywhere, but collected in hundreds on the prickles of the prickly pear bushes that are one of the few plants to colour and decorate the basic sandy tones of the countryside. There are a lot of these bushes.

What this experience did was to highlight the problem these handy containers can create if left to blow wildly over the countryside. That that they were uniformly black certainly heightened the mess they created.

Back home I am amused and amazed by the slavish use of these bags in our shops and supermarkets. They are snapped off the hanger at the checkouts, filed with few items and placed in the trolley as the hand reaches out to grab the next bag for filling. Or offered by sales staff to carry a single item. On average we use five new bags a week. Collectively we use around eight billion bags every year. Cutting out just one in five of these would save almost 40,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases a year – equivalent to taking over 12,500 cars off the road for a year.

I am not about preaching. Figures such as this are amazing and are bandied about to a whistle of astonishment perhaps but nothing much changes. As long as the shops provide us with free bags to take, the majority will continue to take them. Watch at the checkouts at the slavish indulgence of people for using these bags. It’s all too easy for us all. I have seen people place large milk containers singly in to a plastic bag and then lift the bag into the trolley. Have they not noticed the milk container has a handle that is not just for lifting milk in and out of the fridge? Steady now. It’s easy to preach. Do you want it in a bag? No, I think I can manage the newspaper in my hand.

I do have a watch dog. Allow me to introduce WRAP, the Waste & Resources Action Programme has welcomed the announcement by Tesco that the supermarket will be rewarding customers who reuse their carrier bags. I don’t think that that is enough. It’s hardly a life changing policy. Or we could go Modbury’s way. Modbury in Devon became the first town in Europe to ban plastic bags from its shops. After two weeks, an extraordinary transformation then took place in the south Devon community. Carrying a plastic bag has become antisocial behaviour. This is more like it.

Near to Perpignan in France last year, I was pleased to see no plastic bags being available at a local supermarket, one of a chain, and all the shoppers had their own bags. Being on a walking holiday, we had rucksacks. People weren’t distressed at using their own bags. Admittedly, the pace of life is less in that part of the world, as it is, I guess, in Modley, but change did happen. Or perhaps the Irish route is necessary. Ireland's 15p "plastax" on carrier bags, introduced in 2002, has led to a 90% reduction in use.

It is a small crusade I know that I am carrying out by not taking the plastic, but I look forward to the challenge of phase two. Refusing the bags of chain stores is the next one. How to avoid looking like a shop lifter leaving with goods purchased but not placed in the plastic identity bag but in my own reusable bag could give rise to some interesting encounters. Many shops are OK with this, but the ones targeted by shop lifters could and possibly rightly so be worried by losing the plastic bag.

I simply want the weight of the world lightened by cutting down on plastic. Oh yes how much food is bought wrapped and coated with the stuff? Another day.

An infinite fashion

A mathematician once said to me that there must be a finite number of tunes that could be composed, given an octave of 12 notes, with occasional additional sharps and flats, and the range of note lengths. He is possibly correct but in centuries of western music, the finite limit is still not reached. They still keep coming up with more tunes. Occasionally a tune is borrowed, in whole or in part, but there are always more and more new melodies which sound different.

I mention this only that as variety is often quoted to be the spice of life it is a good thing there is a range of music that keeps appearing to entertain each new generation.

I am amused to death by the fact that there are too an infinite way in which trainers can be designed; tracksuit trousers can be created carrying a range of hues and applied stripes to the extent that mostly everyone can appear different from each other. Have a look around at the dress of most people under thirty as they scurry about their daily business in my home town. To the untrained eye, they all look the same. But they are not. Each of them is making their own statement of individuality.

Herds of zebra, for an example from the animal world, are made up of distinctly differently striped individuals. To the untrained observer, they are all the same. Thank goodness the fashion for trainers and tracksuits helps many of us maintain our unique distinctions.

It is however nothing new. Glimpses of photos from the past show this mass conformity where individuality is marked by slight variations in colour and pattern. The conformity does not obviously apply to all society at once. Just as spots make leopards and stripes make zebras, then the type of apparel makes your social standing.

A theory I hold is that the higher the social standing the longer the clothing trend is maintained. Prince Charles would look at home with the upper class fashion of seventy years ago, both in formal and informal appearances. The lower classes change so much that some who do not keep up will be so last year too soon.

This is true too a point. I feel there comes a time in your fashion were something strange occurs and there are observable patterns of behaviour. As individuals age, they do one of three things. They dress the same as they have always done - Prince Charles again as an example of his class - once in tweeds and Barbours then always in tweeds and Barbours. Or they keep changing with the flow of fashion and end up looking like they are i.e. old people still trying to look young. Or thirdly, at some age they stop changing and dress the rest of their lives the same way like some strange time stop when some internal voice says “wear what you wear from now on”. You can still spot the septagarian teddy boy, or sexagarian hippy.

As there very few zebras and leopards where I live, I will delight then in spotting the fauna of fashion in the everyday places.