After the little town of Modbury in Devon banned carrier bags last year, it has taken a long time for anyone else in England to catch up.

In fact nobody has caught up yet, there are just schemes to deter shoppers from using the dreaded polluting plastic bags, of which a staggering 13 billion are given away free every year across the country. Taking around 1000 years to decay, it's no wonder something needs to be done about the "white trash".

Just to remind you folks that it's E-Day today...

From 6pm make sure you turn off those lights you're not using, turn off the TV when it's not being watched, don't leave those devices on standby (PCs and printers) and let's see if we can use a little less energy, aye?

Or are we preaching to the converted?

The National Trust has a novel idea for environmental work this leap year with it's own Green Leap Day.

All of the Trust's 4800 staff are being encouraged to take February 29th off and focus their efforts into green projects. The idea is that staff will work on going green at home with numerous simple household tasks such as:

Even the FSB, the Federation of Small Businesses, are on our green bandwagon, but unlike the greenwash brigade they're genuinely into the "go green, shop local" mantra.

Yep, it's Buy Nothing Day tomorrow (Saturday) in the UK. Tonight I shall visit my local brewery the Hog's Back Brewery in Tongham, Surrey, to spend a few shillings on locally produced real ale, so once that silver is spent I shan't be contributing to the cult of rabid consumerism for a whole day.

Modbury in Devon, population just 1553, has today banned the plastic carrier bag.

One of my pet peeves in this obsession people have with preheating ovens. Why do they do it?

Is it because the fire had to be roaring before it was hot enough to cook the pot on? Maybe the Arga needed to be left a while until the coal was burning efficiently?

But these days we don't have so many of these ancient "appliances" (I still love to cook over a real fire on occasions) and the world has changed in terms of how we consume energy - we need to conserve our energy reserves.