Henceforth citizens are not allowed to carry paper bags - especially if the paper in question has already enjoyed another more dignified life

Henceforth, citizens are not allowed to carry paper bags - especially if the paper in question has already enjoyed another, more dignified life, perhaps as a page in the Koran. The new move is part of the Taliban's drive to impose Islamic law in Afghanistan "We respect paper, whether it is written on or not. We have announced that people should not use paper for bags or put paper on the rubbish tip," Amir Khan Mutaqi, the acting information minister, said yesterday. He demanded that people use plastic bags instead. However, paper bags are used more often in the markets of Kabul, not least because plastic ones are much more expensive.Some women even earn their livings by making up paper bags from discarded paper in the street.

One woman squatting in front of a pile of paper bags in Kabul's Karte Parwan market said: "I used to work for the government, I need to sell bags to feed my family. What else can I do?"The government's logic is, as one market trader noted: "There might be some words from the Holy Koran or Arabic writing on the paper which might be thrown away, and that would be an insult to the Holy Koran."The ban on paper bags is only the latest in a string of recent edicts, including a requirement that all government workers grow beards. A number of civil servants have already been sacked for failing to comply.The paper bag ban had unexpected side-effects. There was an immediate run on toilet paper by customers worried that it, too, might be affected by the Taliban edict.. On these chill, colourless days, there could be nothing more warming than Howard Hodgkin's new exhibition at London's Hayward Gallery. This covers 20 years' work of someone considered by many to be our greatest living painter.

Within a few days of opening, the show has been showered with superlatives. In today's Tabloid section, our critic Bryan Robertson says: ``Before you begin to wonder about content or what's going on in real, recognisable terms, you are electrifyingly aware of broad areas of blazing or smouldering red, a deep moody blue or a luminously verdant green practically hitting you from the wall. You're aware of a passionately decisive welter of big, slashed brush-strokes, luscious but alert and bristling in their intensity. Like the smile of the Cheshire cat in Alice, a generalised light-drenched mood seems to be transmitted from the paintings.''You get the picture. On The Riviera (above) may not be cheaper than a radiator, but it's a lot more fun.. Some things are temporary and contingent; they come and they go And when they've gone, they leave little mark.

Sexual passion, Barbie dolls, chocolate-coloured clothing and government crises all fall into this category. But others are eternal and recurrent, essential parts of the deep fabric of life, and it was those - rather than the flashy and colourful plastic of Mr Major's plight - that were preoccupying MPs yesterday. Far from having spent the morning in deep plot, members had clearly been attending the first convivial pre-Christmas lunches. They were neither rowdy nor rancorous, but quiet and contemplative. So while the frantic political world outside chased the latest fashionable emergency, 40 or so gathered together for warmth on the green baize benches and spoke of profound things: of constituencies, ancient jealousies, man's relation with the natural world and of the millennium itself. Toby Jessel (C. Twickenham) has the perpetual air of a man who is experiencing post-hospitality highs and lows.