while cleaning out the cupboard under my sink i stumbled over the usual assortment of paper and plastic bags that inevitably keeps collecting in there.
it happens every few months - no matter how often i remind myself to take along my backpack and a spare linen bag when grocery shopping and therby be a good responsible, earth-conscious german, i do forget, and hence need to buy (!) bags from time to time. that's why i keep them. i paid for them. good money, 15 - 30 cents, depending on shop, bag size and choice of paper or plastic. they are costly these things, and i should reuse them. and i do. which makes the bag collection under the sink quite unruly: there's almost spanking new bags (non reused) and reused ones with torn bottoms and the bags i just keep because, well just because.
plastic bag memorabilia, how low can you go. i am a messy, and keep things. so shoot me, but i keep that one bag from lygon books, because lygon books ain't no more and because it was a lovely bookshop and because that friday night i was there 2 years ago to buy "once upon a collins st", there was a kid waiting behind the corner that reminded me of myself at my rents bookshop. and there's more overseas bags. duty free shop bags. a bag from the prague wax museum (not that i've ever been there). some myer bags that i wrapped my shoes in in my suitcase. two large bombers bags, from shopping for memorabilia at their shop at windy hill.

amongst the paper & plastic bag rubble was also a small crumply and partly torn green, black and yellow paper bag from lush in london. oh, lush. i sniffed the bag, and sure, it still smelt like lush shops smell and like what i transported in it (butterballs, buffy the backside slayer, sympathy for the skin, silky underwear). quite a miracle, after being stacked in the cupboard under the sink for a few months.
on further inspection (not that you can get much further inspecting a paper bag than sniffing it, i admit), i realised why i had kept that -admittely very crumply, torn, non-reusable bag.

it has lush's mission statement on it.
under the headline "a lush life", they set out what they believe in. the first few paragraphs are pretty much what you'd expect. "we believe in...making fresh organic products by hand...without animal ingredients...we believe words like "fresh" and "organic" have honest meaning beyong marketing...yadayada." great. but not unexpected, correct?
and then there's the second last paragraph.

"we believe in long candlelit baths, massage, filling the house with perfume and in the right to make mistakes, lose everything and start again."

what good-smelling smart people these lush folks are.

and now that i've preserved that smart statement, i can finally release that small crumply paper bag into the paper recycling bin.