When I was at a shop checkout recently, the young cashier suggested to the older woman she was serving that she should bring her own bags in future, because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment.

The woman apologised and explained: “We didn’t have this green thing back in my earlier days.”

The cashier responded: “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations.”

She was right – our generation didn’t have the green thing.

Back then, we returned empty bottles to the shop. The shop sent them back to the plant to be washed and refilled, so it could use them over and over. So they really were recycled.

We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced razor blades instead of throwing away the whole razor.

We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every shop and office building.

We walked to the shop and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two streets.

We washed the baby’s nappies because we didn’t have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine – wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house – not a TV in every room.

In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand, because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the post, we used old newspapers to cushion it, not polystyrene or plastic bubble wrap.

We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.

We drank water from a fountain or a tap when we were thirsty instead of demanding a plastic bottle from another country. We accepted that a lot of food was seasonal and didn’t expect to have out of season products flown thousands of air miles around the world.

We actually cooked food that didn’t come out of a packet, tin or plastic wrapping People caught a train or a bus, and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their mothers into a 24-hour taxi service.

And we didn’t need a computerised gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space to find the nearest pizza place. But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we oldies were, just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?

Adrian Taylor Thames Court Eynsham