So my wife rings me at work and says, “Can you just pop into the Co-op on your way home and buy blue top milk, green top milk, bananas and beans. Oh, and we need eggs.”

It’s not her fault but it drives me nuts. To get home, I have an uphill commute with the dog on the leash – granted, it’s only a mile and there’s little traffic in downtown Charlbury. But if I’ve forgotten to bring to work a pannier bag or two to put the inevitable shopping in, I’m in trouble.

That supermarkets charge for carrier bags nowadays is the least of it. In fact, the bag charge was long overdue. No, for me the issue is wobbling uphill with the dog’s lead on one handlebar and a bursting plastic carrier bag on the other.

It’s better if you hold a heavy bag to your body, as bags of any description dangling off a handlebar are a recipe for disaster. Like wrecking balls with minds of their own, one moment they’re lurching heavily into the front wheel spokes, the next they’re lunging haphazardly away from the bike, tugging you off balance.

I do have four pannier bags to go at, but whatever my systems, I never quite get it right. I’ve tried everything from stockpiling them at work (then there aren’t any at home to carry stuff to work) to keeping one on the bike (it went mouldy).

Really, I need the Charlbury Co-op to follow the lead taken by Waitrose at various locations across the UK including many of its Oxfordshire stores. These stores offer free bike trailer loans to help shoppers get their purchases home.

I thought at first this seemed like a gimmick. The press reports gush about reducing congestion and pollution around Waitrose stores. It feels a bit far-fetched, but then out here in the Cotswolds it’s easy to forget how snarled up Oxford’s roads are, and how filthy the air.

In fact, Oxford consistently breaks European clean air legislation, in part because the councils have failed to deliver road schemes that entice drivers out of their cars for those journeys where there are perfectly viable alternatives – such as taking shopping home using a Waitrose trailer. And the news is full of the 50,000 deaths per annum attributed to this dirty air. So I was wrong to scoff: every little helps, to borrow the slogan of another well-known purveyor of groceries.

Then there’s the practicality of it all. I mean, who would really go to the trouble of attaching a shop’s trailer to their bike just to get one shop home? Well, having seen how easy it is, I realise now that I would! Even for a one-mile journey.

All you have to do is get a bracket from their customer services desk and off you go. They’ll even pack it for you. The new Botley Road store in Oxford (which opens on Thursday) recommends booking a trailer in advance which kind of negates the beauty of the scheme.

Really, you need to be able to rock up, as I do at my local shop, with an unexpected text-messaged shopping list of weighty and urgent items, only to be saved by their rather brilliant little scheme. I guess in Oxford the trailers would run out rather quickly, but that’s better than them having no trailers to borrow at all, like my local shop which doesn’t even have bike parking.