The local supermarket (it's a fine foods one) has got into not offering plastic bags any more.
They hide them under the counter and you have to ask for them. When I went out this morning, though, I had forgotten my "bag for life" and so had to go through the shameful process of asking for a carrier.
This has happened very recently, partly due to the media coverage of devastation caused by plastic bags in the environment. Those pictures of turtles caught up in bag handles, or Indian children in water swamped with plastics, are horrendous.
Last year, when I was on the final year of my art degree, one of the students was doing a landscape project.
She had been painting the landscape in an abstract way, but all the time she had spent outside led her to think about one thing: plastics in the landscape and the way they were destroying the environment.
She wanted to express her idea in film, but her tutors had her earmarked as a painter and she was "not allowed to."
She was asked the question: "Are you an artist or an environmental activist?"
Couldn't she be both?
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