String bags are all very well but…

You can’t hide anything private in them on the way home from the shops. If you bought er, I don’t know…a pregnancy test kit, everyone knows. If it was a pair of yellow y-fronts, ditto. In fact, you couldn’t hide a tube of haemorrhoid cream, acne treatments, a cheeky bottle of vodka, a large packet of condoms or a box of supermarket own brand beef burgers. You just can’t. They are there, on display for the world and his wife to see.

So, I have an idea – how about you don’t buy any of those and fill your string bag with dark green and purple vegetables? That’d do it. You could walk around town all day with a string bag brimming with virtuous but utterly dull things. Would people think you were a saint? Perhaps they’d see through not just the bag but you too and realise you were just plain dull. Or maybe going back to the days of the brown paper bag is the answer. Yep, you can hide a multitude of sins in a brown paper bag.

Do you know the poem about being old and wearing purple – perhaps you should just carry your string bag, filled up with cream buns, indigestion remedies and incontinence pants and not care a fig about what anyone thinks?