Coming Around Again

All it takes for something to become ‘the norm’ is for a single generation to grow up with it. If a whole crop of children cannot recall a time when a thing did not exist, it will become regarded as a time-honored tradition, venerable monument or indispensable gadget. And, having always been there, the logic concludes, it always should be.

Take television. My earliest memories of our family home include the black and white television that sat in the corner of the living room on the old coffee table, and although my dad often spoke of evenings sitting and listening to the radio, all I could think was, “Wow, you were so poor you couldn’t afford a TV? Aren’t you glad you’re living with us now?”

Intellectually, I know television did not become a common household item until the late 50’s but if I were somehow transported to Tudor times, it wouldn’t surprise me to see them retiring to the drawing room in the evening with a tankard of ale to watch Eastenders on the telly. Unsurprisingly, just as this experience is my reality, there now exists a younger generation for whom black and white television is something they read about in history books.

Allow me, then, to set the record straight (listen up you young whippersnappers): There was a time, not long ago, when you had to get up and walk to the television to change the channel or adjust the volume. Your phone was hard-wired into your house and the height of coolness was having an extension cord long enough to allow you to talk on it outside. Computers were used for computing; only scientists were interested in them and you couldn’t download porn with them.

Furthermore, although this is the norm for you and your friends, if the laws of physics inexplicably changed and it was no longer possible to transmit signals through the air or with wires, there would suddenly be no TV, mobile phones or internet, and a whole generation of old folks would calmly walk up to the panicked mobs and say, “I remember these days, this is how it should be,” and life would go on, much as it had before, though with less porn.

But I’m not here to talk about such apocalyptic happenings; I’m here to talk about shopping bags.

Grocery bags, shopping bags carrier bags, whatever you call them, when I was a kid, they were made of paper, and we liked it that way. My mother, like all mothers everywhere, rich or poor, had amassed a stockpile of bags that could have seen us into the next century. We couldn’t possibly use them all, but we used quite a few; they were handy for making book covers, impromptu masks and were great fun to put cats into to watch them try to get out. They didn’t make very good bin-liners, however, but at least they were biodegradable.

To me, this was how it always had been, but in my mother’s younger days, she went from shop to shop with a basket or reusable carrier bag, so these newfangled, disposable bags were probably looked upon as a wasteful extravagance.

But one day, as we all know, the paper bags disappeared, to be replaced by plastic sacks. We had to find other ways to cover our books and annoy our cats, but the new bags made better bin liners and it’s a comfort knowing that, 10,000 year from now when archaeologists dig up our settlements, they’ll be able to learn if we shopped at Wilkinson’s.

And now the plastic carrier bag is under threat. Although I say that as if I’ll be sorry to see them go, I won’t. Maybe frugality comes with age, or I’d like to see a cleaner planet left to my children’s children, but I’ve come to believe we’ve left enough indestructible plastics lying around to keep any future historians happy, so I welcome the move by several major supermarket chains to encourage people to return to the practice of my mother’s day and carry the family shopping home in eco-friendly, reusable bags.

This trend comes none too soon, as my wife has used every spare nook and cranny in our flat to amass a stockpile of plastic bags that can easily see us into the next century. Good thing, too, or I don’t know what we’d do for bin liners.