I am 68 and I have carried my shopping in the wrong bag for forty years. This is the first bag I have ever written a letter about.
I am 68 and I have carried my shopping in the wrong bag for forty years. This is the first bag I have ever written a letter about.
Six things this soft green tote gets right that a handbag and a bag for life never could, from a woman who spotted it in the queue at the Saturday cheese stall.
Pat Holloway · Customer · Leeds · 5 min read
Let me say who is talking first. I am Pat, I am 68, and I live in Leeds with my husband Brian, who is 70, and his spaniel Wilf. I have bought my own handbags for fifty years and more, and I have never once thought a bag worth writing to anybody about. Well. I have changed my mind, and it took a stranger in a cheese queue to do it.
The bag is the Sophie, from Manchester Boutique, a small British boutique I have been buying my things from for a while now. It is a soft ribbed tote in a lovely olive green, with two shoulder straps, a pocket at each end and a little cream cord tie on the front. When the boutique asked if they could put my letter up for other women to read, I said yes, on the condition I could be completely honest in it.
I first saw it at our Saturday farmers market. Brian walks Wilf round the stalls and I queue for the cheese, which is the best queue in the place if you ask me. Everybody in it is like I was, a handbag on one arm and a carrier bag cutting into the other hand, trying to pay without dropping the leeks. There is one woman who is not. She stands there with one soft green bag on her shoulder, and in it goes a wedge of cheese, a loaf, two leeks and her purse, and she still has a hand free for her coffee. I had her down as one of those women who has her whole life sorted. Then I noticed it was the same bag every week, and the week before she had brought it in black. So while the man was cutting my Wensleydale, I asked her, plainly. She laughed and said she had given up handbags for anything with a food shop in it. She told me the name, and I put it in my phone before my change came. Read on.
The cheese stall queue the Saturday after mine came. Cheese, a loaf and two leeks in, and a hand free for once.
Here is what fifty years of buying bags taught me. Somewhere after sixty, a woman’s bags split into two piles. There is the handbag pile, which is too small, too stiff and too precious to put a cabbage in. And there is the shopping pile, which is carrier bags and bags for life that look exactly like what they are. Nothing in between.
I had got to the age where the nice bag stayed at home on the shopping days, and the shopping bag got hidden under the café table. I had stopped expecting one bag to do both, and I had certainly stopped expecting to see one in the cheese queue.
That is the shops’ doing, not ours. This is the first bag I have owned that sits in the middle, and having carried it through a wet end of September, four Saturday markets and a trip to the library, I can tell you it comes down to six things.
The morning it came. Out of the bag, onto the bed, and I was already working out what it would hold.
The ribbed texture looks like you chose it
The boutique calls it a sleek ribbed texture that adds dimension, and that is exactly it. From across the market it reads as one soft olive green, the colour of the leaves before they turn. Close up you see the ribs running top to bottom, and the little wavy edge round the rim. It does not look like a carrier bag and it does not look like it cost the earth. It looks like something you picked out on purpose, which I suppose is the point.
On the kitchen chair by the kettle. The ribs, the little cord and one of the end pockets.
I get asked about this bag more than any handbag I have owned. People always want to touch the ribs.
Margaret T., GlastonburyIt holds the whole Saturday shop
The boutique says it has a spacious interior with ample room for books or personal items, and I can vouch for that. On a Saturday mine takes a wedge of cheese, a loaf, a library book, my purse and my glasses case, and there is still room for the leeks if I let their tops stick out. It is soft, so it gives a little when it is full rather than bursting at the seams, and it sits up on its own when I put it down.
What went in on Saturday. Book, cheese, purse, glasses, apples. Room to spare.
I used to take a handbag and a bag for life to the market. Now I take this and nothing else, and it all goes in.
Christine B., LangportA pocket at each end for the little things
This is the one I did not know I needed. There is an open pocket at each end of the bag, outside, and the boutique says they are there for quick access to things like your phone or keys without digging inside. They are right. My phone lives in one end and my keys in the other, and I have not tipped the whole bag out on a bench looking for either since. When you are holding a coffee and paying for cheese, that matters more than you would think.
Home from the market, leeks first. Keys still in the end pocket where I left them.
Phone one end, keys the other. I have stopped rummaging at the till, which my daughter says is a miracle.
Pauline R., SomertonOn the shoulder or in the hand
The boutique says it carries on the shoulder or in the hand, and both work. The two straps are soft and long enough to go over my shoulder, even over my winter coat, so the weight sits at my hip and my hands are free. Short trip, I just hold it by the straps. It hangs on the hook by the front door with my coat, so I pick both up together on the way out.
Where it lives, on the hook by the door next to my good coat. It goes out with me most days now.
The straps go over my thick winter coat without a struggle, and it does not dig in even when it is full.
Jean W., GlastonburyThe little cream cord people notice
On the front there is one short cream cord, tied in a knot, which the boutique calls its drawstring detail. It does not do a job as such, it is the finishing touch, and it is the bit people comment on. Against the olive green it looks thought about, the way a nice button does on a coat. Twice now somebody in a queue has asked me about the bag because of it, which I think is how these things spread.
It is the little cord on the front that made me stop and look. Simple bag, but it has something about it.
Sheila M., BrutonIt goes with everything, in four colours
The boutique says it fits with casual outfits or more polished looks, and that has been my experience. It looks right with jeans and a fleece for the market and right with my good camel coat for lunch in town. It comes in green, black, yellow and white, all one size. My sister June borrowed my green one for a single Saturday and did not give it back until I ordered her one of her own, so I have been back already. The woman from the cheese stall tells me she has two.
Bought the green for me and the black for my sister. Same lovely soft bag, and we both use them every day.
Valerie S., LangportThe Sophie, against what I had been making do with
You can carry on choosing between the handbag pile and the shopping pile, like I did for years. Here is the difference, laid out plainly.
Pretty but tiny, or roomy but plain ugly
Two bags to carry and a hand never free
Phone and keys lost at the bottom
Handles cutting into your fingers
The nice one stays at home on market days
Nice to look at and roomy at once
One bag for the whole shop
A pocket at each end for the little things
Soft straps over the shoulder
Goes out with you every day
About the price
The Sophie is £29.95, down from £60.00. All four colours are the same price.
I will pass on what the boutique told me, which is that it is in the sale while the first of the autumn stock goes, and once a colour sells through, that one is gone. Their words, not mine. What I can tell you from my side is that I have paid more than £60.00 for handbags that never once came to the market with me. £29.95 for one I take everywhere made it an easy yes.
And I do not trust perfect scores, so I read the reviews before I ordered. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars, which sounded like real people rather than robots, so I read on. The same six things I have just walked you through come up in them, over and over, in other women’s words.
If your nice bag stays at home on shopping days, or your shopping still goes in a carrier you would rather hide, this is where I would start. Have a look before the green goes, because the first autumn stock will not wait. And if you are ever in the cheese queue on a Saturday and see a woman with a soft green bag on her shoulder and a hand free for her coffee, it might be her, and it might be me.
Pat
THE SOPHIE RIBBED TOTE BAG
- Soft ribbed texture in olive green
- Roomy inside for the whole day’s shopping
- An outside pocket at each end for phone and keys
- Carry on the shoulder or in the hand
- Little cream cord detail on the front
- Green, black, yellow or white
- Free UK delivery
Sale on now. The first autumn stock is already going.