It’s very good news for the environment that the supermarket chain Morrisons is to abolish plastic bags for wrapping fruit and vegetables, and return to using recycled paper instead. Plastic, as Sir David Attenborough has pointed out, lingers in the environment, killing off nature and marine life, for between 450 million years and “forever”.
We are stewards of the earth and all living things, so it’s surely our bounden duty to reduce the use of plastic.
But there’s another reason I’m pleased to see the announcement from this major supermarket: it confirms my theory that if you wait long enough, everything comes back into fashion, or into use once again.
I recall many items being purchased in paper bags in my 1950s childhood. You bought a pennyworth of sweets and they were wrapped in a kind of cone of paper. Sugar was weighed out in paper bags, as was tea. In the country, butter was cut from a slab and wrapped in greaseproof paper.
How ecological!
Milk bottles were washed out, and returned to the milkman. We didn’t drink bottled water, but we did purchase other drinks – in bottles made of glass. Then we returned the bottle to the shop and retrieved a threepenny deposit on it.
This practice will soon return, I predict, hailed as the height of environmental virtue.
The big headache for the recycling experts at present is the toothpaste tube. The tubes from which toothpaste is squeezed are almost impossible to recycle, because they’re made of multiple layers laminated together. And in Britain we chuck away 250 million empty toothpaste tubes annually.
Boffins are scratching their heads wondering how to get toothpaste back into the tube, to facilitate a recycling habit.
But it’s impossible: so we will soon seen a return to a (recyclable) open box of paste for tooth-cleaning, as existed before the plastic tube was invented.
Just watch. Everything eventually goes back to the beginning.
…….
Rupert Everett says that he deliberately constructed a scene in his film The Happy Prince evoking the idea of Christ being mocked by the mob.
This is the episode in Oscar Wilde’s life when he was released from Reading Gaol, and had to await a change of trains for two hours at Clapham Junction. When a crowd discovered his identity, they taunted and mocked him mercilessly.
Later in the film, as Oscar approaches death in a seedy Paris hotel, Everett implies that his conversion to Catholicism had occurred when he knew what it was like to be mocked as Christ was. An Irish priest, played by Tom Wilkinson, is brought to administer the Last Rites.
Everett, an Ampleforth old boy, strikes me as double-edged when it comes to the faith in which he was raised. He draws on it, as an artist. But he’s quite disparaging about his Ampleforth experiences in his autobiography Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins.
His film about Wilde is also double-edged: it implies that Oscar rather preferred life in the gutter to life among the stars: absinthe in proletarian Paris suited him better than Mayfair glitter. And although Wilde suffered for his sins (and for Victorian hypocrisy too), his own streak of self-destructiveness was a contributory factor to his family’s alienation. An edgy movie, but deeply felt.
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When I was lifting gin and tonics with Maeve Binchy in Dublin’s Pearl Bar in the 1970s, little did I imagine that I was quaffing with a future queen of the high seas.
But now Senator Neale Richmond, speaking in the Irish Senate, has called for the next Irish naval ship commissioned to be named the “LÉ Maeve Binchy”, as a tribute to the centenary of women gaining the vote. (Irish state vessels are prefixed LÉ, standing for Long Éireannach, or “Irish ship”.) He told the minister of state for defence that the vessel should be ordered forthwith.
That’s very nice, and I’m sure it would be warmly greeted in any port, although of all the conversations I had with Maeve, I don’t think that we exchanged a single word about women and the vote. I seem to remember that we sank quite a few bevvies talking more about … men.
Meanwhile the LÉ Maeve Binchy will surely prove unsinkable …
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