YOU can choose the budget option for many things in life – plain white T-shirts, peanut butter, baked beans, car insurance, but never bin bags. Life is tough enough without having to scoop up with your bare hands a mixture of food waste, broken glass, smouldering embers and discarded household bills that falls out when your overfull cheap bag splits.

Get the strongest, biggest bag money can buy – you will not regret it.

With that maxim in mind, I went to buy some industrial strength bin bags and other essentials recently. Shopping in Aldi feels a little like shopping abroad, not least because of arrangements at the check-out. You queue up and exchange pleasantries with the staff member, which is fairly standard. But then they start chucking your groceries at you like they are attempting a timed grocery chucking game on The Cube.

There's no collection area for the groceries to go if you can't pack fast enough, just a narrow ledge. Apparently, you're supposed to throw all your groceries back in your trolley and then go pack your bags – if you have remembered to buy any or bring some – on the window ledge. If you don't play the game properly and leisurely pack your bags at the till ledge before leisurely placing them in your trolley, the checkout staff get a bit chippy.

My solution is to use the children to form a human chain to transfer your items from the till to the window ledge.

Anyway, strong bin bags are the way forward.

Elsewhere, the electioneering has begun in earnest, although it's good to see that Ukip's Matthew Cook isn't resorting to negative campaigning.

He has been helping migrating toads get to Cod Beck reservoir near Osmotherley and sent a high-definition photograph of two mating amphibians to prove it. Presumably they were skilled toads and so were allowed to migrate freely.