In the bag.

The Herald Diary reports "PRIME Minister Gordon Brown's call for the phasing out of single-use plastic bags surprised one of his old university buddies at Edinburgh who tells us: "Gordon never had a briefcase right up until he was an MP. He carried everything in an assortment of plastic bags. If you were meeting him in the pub you could hear him rustling before he even came in the door."

Gordon Brown in a pub ... with a plastic bag ... scandalous.

Wood for the plastic.

The irony really doesn't escape Mr Smith. It obviously did with the Forestry Commission.

"THE Forestry Commission was under fire ... after it placed an order for more than £52,000 worth of plastic bags."

Even the reference to fires and forests ... get it?

Why not just go the whole hog and replace all the real trees with plastic ones, afterall we are approaching Christmas don't you know.

Plastic ... it's fantastic.

Mr Smith reads that Liberal Democrat MSP Mike Pringle is to attempt to, yet again, introduce a charge of 10 pence on every plastic bag handed over in Scotland's shops.

Now Mr Smith doesn't necessarily object to the concept or even principle of what Mr Pringle is proposing, but what he does object to is the fact that Mr Pringle tried to do exactly the same thing over most of the last four years of the last Scottish Parliament and got ... er ... absolutely nowhere as regards legislative support.

So Mr Smith asks why he is proposing to waste even more time in the Scottish Parliament on an idea he couldn't get through last time, before the voluntary agreement arrived at last time around has even had a chance of being assessed?