Doing a bit of shopping in our local ASDA last night; check-out girl looks baffled when haven't got our own carrier bags. Would you like buy a Bag for Life? she enquires. No indeed, we reply, the regular bags will do us just fine. The response is a trained look of no uncertain disapproval, despite the plastic punnets for the mushrooms, the double wrapped yoghurts, the plastic salad bags - in fact every last damn thing in the shop is so over packaged that we need all the carrier bags we can get just to cope with the rubbish.

I ask again, why is the onus for recycling put on the hapless consumer? Why produce all this non-essential crap in the first place only to make us feel guilty for throwing it away?

Alternatives - The Food Weighhouse - but the last time I shopped there I mixed up the washing powder and the scone mix with disastrous results. Some of us, it would seem, are so culturally conditioned by packaging that we're quite lost without it...