In the seventies young Italian men, and older ones too, carried 2 things in their hands. Their car radio in one and a clutch bag, il borsello, in the other. I vaguely recall my older cousin may have had one and so did an uncle, both stylish chaps, and bus conductors often had them too. By the time I could have afforded one, they had been banished to a footnote in the history of fashion.

Unlike the plastic shopping bag over which there is much controversy and nonsense written. These have been re-invented as durable multi-use bags. We used to diligently re-use our plastic bags for all sorts of things - including trips to the odd show home that we didn't want to mess up. Then, before they were got holey, we would use them as bin liners. But now it's a embarrassing to ask even for one. Oh and the spotty kid has just asked me to prove my age before allowing me to buy wine (why is every one looking at me?), but obviously couldn't give a monkeys about plastic bags. "Er, one will do, thanks and no I think I can pack it all by myself" as I return 3 others summarily shoved in my direction.

Anyway, as well as these multi-use bags many made of tougher plastic, we are also now overrun by more and obscenely large and durable black bin liners. Something is up methinks, as much plastic as before. Maybe we should shop more frequently, on foot of course, so we would only need one or 2 bags - instead of 6 to a dozen floating around in the back of the car? That and reduce the infuriating amount of packaging which up until recently I wasn't allowed to recycle. Petitioning number 10 doesn't seem to be making a huge difference either.

Anyway, it may have been transiently cool to have an Anya Hindsmirch "I Am Not A Plastic Bag", but I've just stumbled on a nice idea. It is courtesy of Selvedge, a sexy high quality textile photography mag (you don't have to be a textile obsessive to want to flick through it). The design, from a very cool japanese linen / textile company Lin-net.com is universal, so I guess you can modify easily. The tricky bit is that you have to make it yourself (groan), which one hopes will encourage you use it again and again (if only to show off). A long way off from the ephemeral italian borsello, and not for all blokes, but here are the instructions for the Linnet Pattern (a pdf).

Oh I should say that I barely did any research for this article, as usual, but a website I did look at, the blog by homo dementis, suggests I maybe wrong about the transience of "il borsello". And why is it that when you type in ecomonkey into Google it says "did you mean gaymonkeys?" FYI Google, Ecomonkey is a baby and hasn't got as far as working out it's gender.