There are less plastic bags than there used to be, but still there is a lot.
There are some plastic bags which are too good to use as bin liners. They are too sturdy, perhaps, or badged with a place you want to remember. Shakespeare’s Globe might be an example of that, tho that is something I just pulled out of the air to make myself seem more worldly than I feel sitting in this suburban room of this suburban house of this suburban life. I don’t have any plastic bags that I’m keeping because they’re badged ‘Shakespeare’s Globe’.
Some – the very sturdy ones – I fold. Look closely and you can see them here. To maintain such a stack requires a household commitment and it would be, I think, unusual to find two people who both believe that it is something worth spending their time on.
One day I will knit one of those of coathanger covers like the one a library volunteer once knitted me. ‘It gives you something to do,’ she said, ‘while you wait for the carrots to boil’. At the time, I had no idea what she meant.
But there are many bags which fit between those to be used as bin liners and those to be preserved. And they sit, scrunched in one large plastic bag in the cupboard where the vacuum cleaner lives. Never quite used and never quite not.
Something I want, something I really, really want is one of those calico things. You know a sausage kind of thing with elastic at both ends. You push the bags in the top and pull them out of the bottom. But if I were to hang one of those, I wonder how many times would I need to mutter ‘Shakespeare’s Globe’.
We each have our own problems.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackbird17/471137565/
Nyahahah. Those bags, they haunt us, don’t they?
I had a sausage of the kind you describe once, and they’re a tad overrated (they do fill up rather quickly.)
I also had a bewdiful Harrods bag in the ’80s that a travelling friend sent to me – she really coveted my babies, I coveted her freedom. It was an unequal kind of envy in the end. After treasuring and cossetting the bag for quite a few years, unfortunately I took it swimming with the children one day – and left a wet towel in it, which sent it all mouldy. REALLY. What a drip I was. Not even bright enough to try White-Kinging it out again. I guess I didn’t really deserve it.
Yes, tube overrated.
Dogs are very useful for using up plastic bags, though for dog poo I use small plastic bags, the type that bread comes in and magazines etc. We shove all ours into a big sturdy fashion-shop plastic bag under the sink and I sometimes push the ‘good’ ones to the bottom to avoid using them but in the end, what’s the point of keeping them really? (Though I do have a plastic bag full of packets of photos from the 70s and the bag comes from a shop where I grew up and the shop no longer exists – so I keep that bag.)
At the bottom of my pantry, next to The Bag of Bags, lives a Bag of Bubblewrap. Saved “just in case.”
I love the big bags which I use in the wardrobe as dust protectors over the dress shoulders. Now that there’s only me, I turned the waste tidy in the kitchen into a plastic bag holder. I even use the bread wrapping for food scraps and haven’t bought garbage bags in 4 years. My mother-in-law used to laugh at me because I never got out of the habit of tying any plastic bags into knots so the kids wouldn’t suffocate.
Can’t you knit yourself a tube? Thus using that valuable carrot-boiling time in a productive fashion.
p.s. I always tie the bags in knots and I never knew why.
Yes, I tie the bags in knots too!
I have a cardboard carton in the cupboard under the sink. In the olden days, knotting the bags was useful because they took up less space. Now that I use the green bags and the kids are past the suffocating age, I guess I could stop doing it.
It’s funny how we keep doing stuff and forgetting the why.
Oh, yes. The bubblewrap. Also, those padded post bags. I think you need them if you start selling stuff on ebay, but why I’ve got them cluttering my laundry I’ll never know.
Perhaps I will knit myself a tube. Tho I have few more cross stitches to stitch now. And a new knitting project.
It would be a good short story, wouldn’t it? ‘The Knots in the Plastic Bags’.
My mister HATES it when people tie knots in plastic bags. Come to think of it so do I, after all, it’s usually in an emergency (dog poo, kiddie poo clothes etc) that you need one and who wants to stop and untie the knot with teeth and one non pooey hand?
Nice to meet you, mem – indeed, if you need a plastic bag there is usually some kind of gooey mess involved.