A small, entirely petty dispatch on the specific social theatre of the twenty pence bag charge, six years after it should have stopped feeling personal.

I have lived with the plastic bag charge for long enough now that it should, by any reasonable measure, no longer register as a genuine emotional event. And yet, somehow, every single time I forget my tote bag and have to hand over twenty pence for a carrier at my local corner shop, I experience a brief but genuine flash of moral inadequacy that feels wildly disproportionate to the actual sum involved.

Part of this, I think, is the specific look the shopkeeper gives me, a look I have come to recognise instantly and which I am almost certain has gotten marginally more pointed over the years, as though my continued failure to remember a tote bag after this many years of the policy existing represents some kind of personal character flaw rather than simple, ordinary forgetfulness.

I have started keeping a spare tote bag in every coat I own specifically to avoid this interaction, which has led to the genuinely absurd situation of owning considerably more tote bags than I could ever plausibly need, several of which I now suspect I bought purely to avoid one single moment of mild social discomfort at the till.

The economics of the charge itself remain, as far as I can tell, genuinely sound, and I have no actual objection to the underlying policy or its environmental logic. My objection, if I’m honest, is considerably more petty and considerably more personal: I simply do not enjoy being silently judged by a person I otherwise like and see several times a week, over twenty pence and a momentary lapse in bag-related foresight.

This is not, I recognise, a serious piece of journalism in any meaningful sense. It is a small, deeply specific grievance about a small, deeply specific moment that happens to me roughly weekly, and I suspect, based on several similarly sheepish conversations with neighbours, that I am very far from alone in this particular low-stakes shame spiral.

For the actual policy history and genuine environmental case behind the bag charge, worth a read if you want the serious version of this story, see News Parody.

More from this author at Lowri Griffiths, prat.uk.