Happily or grudgingly, domesticated husbands will know the plastic bag issue has now taken priority in almost every household. The weekly trip to the supermarket is no longer a question of pre-prepared lists quickly printed out on the old PC, but has almost overnight developed into a frantic search for old, re-usable bags one can take to avoid paying the government’s new tax on every type of plastic bag issued to shoppers anywhere on the island.

The other day, Margaret and I carried quite an interesting mixture of bags that I thought had been thrown away long ago. Suddenly they were coming out from everywhere –kitchen cupboards, bedroom drawers, wall-units and other odd corners of our home. The colours said it all. We had blue bags, white bags, beige bags and red bags, so many in fact, that we eventually failed to fill them all up even though we managed, hooray, to qualify for our free weekly soft drinks offer!

Supermarket time for me has always been an alienating social occasion to meet similarly-alienated friends, depending on time pressures; to avoid old bores sometimes by hiding behind a conveniently overloaded trolley, and to watch the rest of the world go by, seemingly on a transparent conveyor belt of like-minded couples and solitary ladies and gents of different sizes and shapes.

This time, though, I was on the lookout for back-from-extinction bags on the assumption that our disinclination to pay the new tax could hardly be an exception.

It certainly wasn’t. People were carrying a vast array of bags some of which must go back to pre-super market days. It was obvious we were not the only ones to search and excavate before going out for the weekly shopping spree. Those who didn’t could be spotted picking discarded empty cardboard boxes from the floor to fill up with their freshly-bought wares.

Salesgirls and shop assistants watched on with obvious amusement as some tried to recreate, in a most entertaining, albeit different way, the Feeding of the Multitude (also known as ‘The miracle of the loaves and fish’). Instead of multiplying bread and fish, they punched in enough cardboard space to fill it with a lot more bread and other items than it could possibly take.

While all this crafty business was going on, however, I couldn’t help noticing that people were also being served with slick, no-handles plastic bags containing items from the delicatessen, the bakery, the butcher and the greengrocer. Even the offer of free soft drinks and water per this or that amount spent, was greatly increasing that morning’s plastic output. Since Malta’s accession to the European Union such liquids are being provided in plastic bottles instead of the old, much more easily recycled glass containers.

The good thing about it, of course, is that while you are denying government the unnecessary tax it has imposed, you are still helping in protecting the environment.

It would certainly have made more sense for the government to ban plastic bags altogether rather than simply demanding a tax to be paid on every bag, even the biodegradable type, supplied by shops and supermarkets to their already heavily-taxed customers. But no, what has taken several countries a mere local authority piece of action to achieve, we have to transform into a major bureaucratic hassle of national proportions.

Many people’s assertion that this blunder-dogged plastic bag exercise has more to do with the island’s current financial mess than actual environmental awareness is highly convincing. A government that honestly seeks to score one for the environment would have opted for a ban rather than a tax, a thesis that continues to gain support among shoppers, the merchant community and environmentalists alike.

It would not surprise anyone if the government one day finally claims success on behalf of the environment as a result of people’s eager inventiveness to avoid paying the tax. It is the kind of reverse psychology so often the refuge of desperate politicians who do something wrong, then wait for the backlash and insist it was what they after all had intended in the first place.

History is full of that. Wars have been won after being lost. Kings have lost their heads and then had their crowns rehabilitated by grateful successors.

Traitors and masochists were later turned into martyrs and saints. Many sporting disasters have also since been glorified, as I was recently horrified to realise when someone was saying on TV that Malta’s 12-1 thrashing at the hands of qualification-chasing Spain way back in the Eighties was providential as it brought everyone to their senses.

There will therefore come the day when today’s clumsiness is equated with shrewdness, the tax described as a wily trap and people’s creativity a natural reaction to good governance.

But it will all sound so plastic.

As the great Art Buchwald once said in Biblical tones: “And Man created the plastic bag and the tin and aluminium can and the cellophane wrapper and the paper plate, and this was good because Man could then take his automobile and buy all his food in one place and He could save that which was good to eat in the refrigerator and throw away that which had no further use. And soon the earth was covered with plastic bags and aluminium cans and paper plates and disposable bottles and there was nowhere to sit down or walk, and Man shook his head and cried: ‘Look at this God-awful mess’.”