Waitrose in Bury St Edmunds, a small but important bit of grocery shopping for the long weekend. The place was packed as only a regional town centre can be on a Saturday afternoon. When, finally, the head of the queue was reached and the goods were paid for, the pimply fellow on the till asked, "where are your bags?"
Well, we'd come shopping at a supermarket, so we didn't have any.
"You have to have your own," he said, smugly. "This is a green till."
In his defence, there was a sign. We hadn't seen it. "Well, here we are now," we said, with the slightly-forced-jollity-oh-please-be-reasonable tone one adopts with the swivel-eyed petty bureaucrat when on his turf with a toe over the absurd line he monitors with zeal. "So can't we please have some bags?"
"No."
Oh, with what delight the staccato negative was spat. "You can buy a Bag For Life, but you can't have any plastic bags."
She Who Must Be Obeyed had her hackles thoroughly up. Eyes blazing (a conflagration our enviro-friends would no doubt veto, too) she marched to a non-green till and took two sinning plastic bags. And, with the disapproving eyes of the acolyte of the Church of Climate Change (a faith as resistant to argument and as fundamentalist in its hatred of our way of life as the maddest of Wahabbists) drilling into us, the goods were packed away, and we fled. Not, if we can help it, to return again.
None of us likes waste. None of us wishes to be profligate or destructive. If environmentalism is made convenient for us, if it can conform to a delivery that might be considered (even at a stretch) to be polite, then we'll all embrace it. But if it becomes too hair-shirt, if it acts to empower the most smugly self-righteous in their fiefdoms and grants to a whole generation of hitherto-fringe figures the power of Seer-in-Charge of public morality, if it makes life for ordinary people more expensive and acts as a shield on extra revenue streams for shops and energy providers cashing in on the latest New Thing, then we reject it.
That's the point I've come to now.
I accept of course that if it weren't for this, then the jobsworth would probably find some other thing with which to persecute the poor shopper - the customer who comes here to spend money. But the fact that it is the greenie lunacy that gave him the stick with which to beat us was the final straw.
Here, for me, the last shred of patience for eco-trendy greenism died. The well-meaning, save-the-world aspect of it is drowned in the mire of bullying and the self-righteousness of it all.
