After a possibly deserved long lie-in, I headed down to Chiswick to do the supermarket shop, post some letters and buy a Christmas tree.
I went to my shopping bag drawer to get my "Bags For Life", but when I opened it I was hit in the face by the overwhelming smell of rotting fish. It was pungent and immediate and surprisingly not very pleasant. I remembered that last time we'd been shopping one of our packets of fish had leaked a little bit. But only a little bit. I hadn't thought any more about it.
But now I was thinking about it. Because my "Bag for Life" drawer smelled of fish. My "Bag For Life" drawer. If you know anything about me then you will know how much plastic bags mean to me. But surely it would be OK. I just needed to find the fishy bag and all would be well.
But I couldn't find it.
I couldn't find it.
All the bags seemed to smell of fish and none of them smelled more of fish than the others. The fish smell had permeated on to all the bags whilst trapped in the bag drawer. But surely that couldn't last. Once the bags had been out of the drawer and in the fresh air the disgusting fish smell would go. In any case nearly all my "Bags For Life" were in there. I couldn't throw them all away. And as long as I could get each one to the relevant supermarket then I could exchange them for new bags anyway.
I put all the "Bags For Life" in a big Tesco shopping bag that hadn't been in the drawer and got in the car and headed for Chiswick.
But as I drove I became aware of the fact that my car was now smelling of fish. How was this tiny bit of fish water creating such a stink?
I took the bags out of the car and again tried to identify the one bag responsible for the pollution but I could not. But I was not going to throw them all away. These were "Bags For Life", not "Bags You Keep Until They All Smell of Fish". We had all made a mutual commitment.
I headed to the Post Office first and stood in the long queue. In the enclosed space, standing next to strangers, I was increasingly aware of the funk around me. My girlfriend was also aware of the problem and finally I cracked, not wanting people to think that it was me who smelled of fish and allowed her to take all but the Tesco bag outside and throw them away. They were going to have to go. The embarrassment was worth more than the 50 or 60 pence that it would cost to replace these receptacles.
And at least I still had my Tesco bag. Which could not smell as it hadn't even been in the drawer.
Except that just being in contact with the stinking bags for 20 minutes had polluted the innocent bag. It stank too. When I left the Post Office and its retching customers, who all had their noses pushed down into their shirts to protect them from the stink, I threw that bag away too.
But were we also tainted by the fish smell. Was this splash of fish water now going to infect everything that had touched anything that it touched. I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to go out in public again.
I had been publicly embarrassed and when I got to Sainsbury's I had to buy five new bags. The "Bags For Life" had not even got recycled, but this may be lucky as any plastic that they touched in the recycling process would also have become infected. If we hadn't taken them out of the bag chain then within months every bag in Britain would have smelled of rotten fish.
I cannot believe how potent it was. Nor how much I mourned my lost bags, which I had believed would be mine for life, though admittedly after being replaced by a chain of replicants.
Goodbye bags.
And if you walk by me any time in the future and notice a fishy smell, now you know why. But don't touch me.
