Bags of bags and not one any good

AWED as I am by the perfection of Halle Berry’s 54-year-old bod, that’s one hideous bikini. More like a game of cat’s cradle that’s gone alarmingly wrong. Any normal mortal would be a laughing stock. I have a suspicion that if I pulled such a bothersome garment out of my holiday suitcase I’d put it on upside down and possibly garrotte myself in the process.

WHEN I lived in New York in the 1970s you took your groceries away in tall brown paper bags which fitted snugly in your arms and were surprisingly easy to carry. There were none of those burns inflicted by plastic bag handles digging into your fingers. Wearing an old tweed coat bought in a thrift shop, dodging between the yellow cabs and the geysers of steam rising from the manholes, hugging my shopping towards my tiny walk-up apartment, I felt like a proper New Yorker, maybe in a Neil Simon film.

Play my cards right and I’d bump into Robert Redford on 14th Street who would offer to carry my shopping and (following some comic misunderstandings when we thought we hated each other but the audience knew it was merely a prelude to true love) ask me to marry him.

Only once did my paper bag let me down – when a downpour of extraordinary ferocity reduced the paper to pulp and the pavement avement was littered with Oreo cookies, kies, pastrami and a bumper pack ck of cinnamon bagels.

That was then. This year, just before the pandemic hit, New York banned plastic bags in shops. And our own Morrisons has launched a trial in eight stores offering only paper bags at the checkout.

The 5p single-use bags had already been replaced d by “bags for life”. Though as we know a “bag for life” is basically a “bag for two weeks if you’re lucky” before you find it disintegrating on the way home as the neck of your economy-sized bottle of gin punches a hole in the side.

Bags for life were supposed to save the world until it was realised that they contain more plastic than the flimsy ones and have to be used at least four times before they have a hope of being more environmentally friendly.

And though paper bags ought to be better they need four times as much energy to make as a plastic bag. And virtuous cotton bags must be used 131 times because they gobble up even more energy. There’s always a catch. But at least paper carrier bags can be put in the recycling and unlike the plastic one won’t be found in a dolphin’s stomach or blowing from a tree branch until kingdom come.

The campaign against single-use plastic seemed to be going quite well before the world locked down and PPE was urgently needed, which must have added millions of tons of plastic waste though for the best possible reasons. Now you see them everywhere, discarded. Pale blue masks and gloves carelessly dropped, destined to end up in the dolphins. A good citizen would pick them up and dispose of them properly but that might give you a dose of Covid.

So you walk on by.