It seems an age since I put pen to paper, but I have a short time now to write about something so ready or not here it is. For some time now I have been on something of a crusade, nothing that may be termed earth shattering or that may warrant the Nobel Prize, but something more down to earth. It started about two years ago, a little while before I began to publish my not too good epistles and whatnots. After I retired on ill health I found myself doing quite a bit of walking. Prior to this I had been in public transport and as a consequence travelled from location to location and meeting to meeting by car, as one does. This being the case the world outside just passed as if it were a separate entity from my small cocooned existence. Once you get out of these machines and start using your legs you see a lot more of your surroundings. So I walked, I saw, and what I saw I didn’t like.
    I walked around my now much smaller world and was sickened by what a mess we as human beings were making of what was once a beautiful place to be, On walking around at a snails pace I was able to see the litter and filth that men woman and children had left behind for others to wade through and clean up. There were fast food wrappers, drinks cans, beer cans, broken glass and a myriad of other detritus that had been abandoned by some unthinking person. One has to remember that all this litter is an artificial contrivance made by man, in the natural world litter does not exist, there is no such thing. In nature things grow, live, die and are returned to the earth from whence they came. Trees don’t sprout plastic bags, nor bushes give bud to electric light bulbs and when did you ever see cliffs made of concrete. No these are man made and don’t rot back to make soil for plants to grow in. I don’t battle against the things I have no control over such as the long lived PCB’s, DDT or even radio active waste. I fight to get government bodies to clean away the rubbish and try and get the ordinary person to put their litter in the place it was meant to go, not on the streets for others to trip over.
    So to this end I complain on a, oh too regular basis to my local council. I will not go into all the e mails I have sent or the replies received. Nor will I speak of the number of times I have had communication with my Member of Parliament on this matter. Suffice it to say that they must all be sick of me by now.
    I am at this point going to do some advertising. I care not one jot that it is blatant, I only care that this may raise awareness of a problem that we all create and that we all can do something about. For a number of years now I have had a web site devoted to trying to shame my council into cleaning up this area. I do not want nor do I need any financial support from anyone in this, in case you were wondering. This site is purely to raise this problem in the minds of not only those who live in the UK but those who live in any town or city anywhere in the world. I have to say that America is by far the greatest visitor to my little site and it really is most gratifying to look at the statistics and see the interest shown by that country. If you wish to visit this site it can be found under www.littersnooper.com/ or if you wish, type in Litter around us. I need to stress that it is on the Google search engine. I know not how this all works but it seems that it is only on Google. Perhaps if I did not have creeping old age accompanied by galloping senility I may be able to fathom it out. Anyway there you have it, and if you want to look at rubbish; come and have a short visit. Remember: don’t drop it, put it in a bin or take it home.