More reasons to shop Morrisons? Bags more mystery in Tajikistan…

*The thrilling sequel to The Mysterious Case of the Morrisons bags

On our final day in Kyrgyzstan, we shopped for snacks for a road trip on Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway.

At the supermarket, the cashier packed our biscuits into a Morrisons bag. At the fruit stall, our apples and pears were weighed in one. The jolly bread lady waved away my “I really don’t need another plastic bag please” gesture, and popped our warm loaf into – no twists yet – another Morrisons bag.

And as our car wound higher and higher to a yurt camp at the base of 7,134m Peak Lenin, I puked quietly into a Morrisons bag. It felt like a fitting end to my obsession.

It wasn’t.

The Eastern Pamirs barely has any people, never mind shops. But in the two-road town of Murghab, I spied a woman selling wheels of bread from under a blanket and guess what was under there too…

But wait, something was amiss.

I noted the mysterious logo, the bag’s unusually small size, the fact that it tore within two minutes. I stroked my beard and channelled Columbo… could this be an imposter?

A cunning one. All the details were correct, right down to the Keep Britain Tidy blurb.

If only they’d taken the trouble to translate it, my magnifying glass might not have come across more evidence the next day, littering a marsh in one of the rare lush valleys in this arid region, where herders bring their animals to graze.

Two days later, in the Wakhan Valley, a kind woman spotted me and Matt plodding hungrily down the lane and beckoned us into her frontroom, which turned out to be the village’s sole shop. We bought a tin of sardines because that’s all she had and, lo and behold, from under the counter she whipped out…

To the shopkeeper’s surprise, I squawked with delight. (Columbo would have too.) My suspicions were confirmed: here was the imposter in flagrant blue, going by the name of MARRISONS.

I twiddled my moustache thoughtfully. This meant I was right on counts 4 and 6: someone has stolen the blueprint of the Morrisons bag AND it’s even more popular than River Island bags were at Darland High School in 1998.

Even more shockingly, by the time we got to Tajikistan’s capital, I’d got bored of taking photos of the colourful fakes. I couldn’t resist checking out the plastic bag stall at the bazaar though…

15 somoni per roll (£1.20).

Ladies and gentleman, there’s just time to draw a line under this case before I exchange 500 Tajik somoni for 400,000 Uzbek som on the black market and cross another border.

My theory is that the Morrisons bags in Kyrgyzstan are the real deal: they’re bigger and don’t immediately rip like every other plastic bag I’m given. Maybe that’s why they’re so prized and why fakes ones are all the rage in Tajikistan.

Strangely, Morrisons never replied to my tweet asking why every other Kyrgz vendor was handing out their bags. Perhaps their environmental policy doesn’t extend to caring about what happened to the millions of single-use bags they must have dumped when they rebranded, or perhaps 17 of their top investigators are on a plane to Bishkek as I type.

I doubt they’ll care about the millions of rubbish fakes floating around Tajikistan either. Trademark infringement is almost as common as incredible mountain vistas in these parts.

But Morrisons might seriously want to think about expanding into Central Asia before Marrisons do…