Bag for Life Top Trumps revisited

Now that England has joined other parts of the UK in charging 5p for a 'single use'* shopping bag, I thought it was worth revisiting a middle class game I brought up a while ago, especially as I have since discovered an additional, powerful card to add to the pack.

As someone with green aspirations (come on, I did write Ecologic), I'm all in favour of supermarket 'bag for life' offerings, which mean you reuse your bags rather than throw them away. However, I think it is boring, and quite possibly in bad taste, to use a bag in the shop from which it was obtained.

Instead, to keep the shopping experience amusing, the good middle class shopper should play a game of Bag-for-life Top Trumps®. The idea is simple. Always use a bag with snob value at the supermarket in which you are shopping. So:

In Aldi/Lidl use at least an Asda bag**
In Asda use at least a Tesco bag
In Tesco use at least a Sainsbury's bag
In Sainsbury's use at least a Marks and Spencer bag
In Marks and Spencer use at least a Waitrose bag
In Waitrose use at least a Booths bag

In my previous list, Waitrose was top of the food chain (geddit?), but I have since discovered the North West-only chain Booths, which makes Waitrose look common.

But there is still the final problem. What to do in that doyen of supermarkets? Not a problem at all, because there is one bag that trumps them all - a French supermarket bag. In fact it's best to stick to one of these at any store, then you don't have to worry about whether you are properly attired. You can turn up in your pyjamas, a deer stalker and a tutu and still feel superior.

* I'm always a bit wary of the term 'single use'. There's no doubt that this kind of usage tax does significantly reduce the number of 'single use' bags issued by supermarkets, which sounds very green. However, there was some evidence from Ireland, when this approach was introduced there, that the consumption of the plastic film going into plastic bags went up, not down. This is because many people actually re-use 'single use' bags for other purposes, e.g. bin bags, food bags etc. As they then had to buy 'real' bin bags etc., which typically use significantly more plastic than the equivalent 'single use' bag, the impact seemed to be to actually increase the plastic (by weight) going into waste.

** Having said that, there's a bit of inverse snobbery that means that bags from really cheap places have a slight cachet that lets them play up a level or two. But they still don't work at Marks and Spencers and above.

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...

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