Going Green Blues!
Coffee Break Tale
It was only when Eileen reached the checkout that she remembered she didn’t have the fistful of used carrier bags you had to take to the shops these days. She’d only popped out for milk, but picked up some other essentials. Shopping for one was best done in short sorties.
“Do you need bags?” snapped the green-haired assistant, metal studs glinting in her nose, ear and lip.
“I guess so,” said Eileen, as she put her shopping on the conveyor belt.
“You should bring a reusable bag,” she said, sniffily flapping some plastic bags into the loading area. “These are ruining the environment, you know.”
“Sorry, dear.” Eileen bit back the temptation to say it was bad enough paying extra for bags without being made to feel guilty about it. “We didn’t have all this green business in my day.”
“That’s the trouble,” said the cashier, passing a tub of milk over the scanner. “If your generation had looked after the planet we wouldn’t be in this state.”
“You’re probably right,” said Eileen, packing her milk. “But we didn’t have to worry about recycling plastic bottles. We used to give glass bottles back to the milkman to be sterilised and re-used.”
“And you could take other bottles back to the shop and get thruppence for them,” put in a cultured male voice.
Eileen looked up at a man with white hair and a dashing goatee who was standing behind her in the queue.
“That was when kids got out and about,” Eileen agreed. “Instead of being glued to phones and computers that end up in landfill. Not to mention all the packaging they come in.”
“We had only one TV in the house,” said the white-haired gentleman. “Not a giant flat screen in every room, with most of them left on standby.”
“We used to walk or ride our bikes everywhere, didn’t we?” Eileen reminisced. “Not chauffeured to school in petrol-guzzling four-wheel drives like the kids of today.”
The cashier glanced suspiciously from pensioner to pensioner as she scanned a bag of apples.
“And nothing came wrapped in plastic,” Eileen observed, packing the fruit. “It was loose or in brown paper bags you could re-use to line cupboards, or cover school books.”
“And we never thought to recycle our newspapers,” said the white-haired man, putting his copy of The Times on the conveyor belt behind Eileen’s shopping. “We used them to wrap things, instead of all the bubble-wrap they use today.”
“Are you talking about recycling?” piped up a Welsh woman queuing behind the man. “We didn’t throw away disposable nappies, either. We washed the towelling ones – and by hand, mind you, not in a washing machine.”
The cashier rolled her eyes into her pierced eyebrows and wondered what can of worms she’d opened.
“Then we dried them on the line,” Eileen called to her new Welsh friend. “Not in a tumble dryer.”
“Wind power and solar power,” the white-haired gent said pointedly to the green-haired checkout girl.
“So no, I suppose we weren’t as environmentally minded as you are today,” Eileen reflected, as she produced her debit card and regarded her shopping bags full of pre-packed goods. “But I don’t remember all the packaging we have today.”
“And we were much fitter,” said the trim man with the goatee, as he paid for his paper with a contactless card. “No need to run on an electric-treadmill when you pushed a manual lawn mower around instead of polluting the atmosphere with a petrol one.”
“No processed food either,” said the slender Eileen. “I still walk everywhere.”
“Absolutely,” said the man. “And we had chivalry. So perhaps you’d allow me to carry your bags?”
“Looks like she’s pulled,” said the Welsh woman, reaching the till. “And no, I don’t need a bag.”