What Is Going On?

     It saddens me to see the amount of litter that is abandoned in our towns.

 

  

 

     As I drove home today I passed a terraced house with a bus stop outside and beyond the front garden wall was a three piece suite piled and abandoned and this seems to be becoming a regular sight.   The council men that removed the abandoned fridges from outside my house a couple of weeks ago told me that they spend their week driving around picking up the assorted detritus that is no longer required.   Apparently there is a service that can be used and it costs a few pounds to have up to five items removed but people aren't willing to pay so they abandon their unwanted items outside their gate and then call the council to say that the items have been fly tipped to avoid the charge.   In time I'm sure the council will cotton on and they will probably stop charging the fee but nothing is free, so our rates will go up yet again.   Yesterday I saw a pile of rubbish abandoned in a layby and people are taking money to remove items and then they dump them in laybys and country lanes and pocket the money leaving the disposal of these items to the council.   

 

                                                  WHAT IS GOING ON?  

 

      When I was a youngster it was drummed into us that we brought our litter home so sweet wrappers and crisp packets were pocketed and binned in an orderly fashion.   Admittedly I was raised to believe that eating in the street was not acceptable and ladies smoked sitting down!  I am old but I miss those standards and the civic pride that we shared with our fellow townsfolk.  

 

     It took me four years to get a bus shelter, like the one above, removed from its location close to my driveway.   My neighbours and I had endless problems with groups of young men gathering to smoke dope and sell various drugs at night.   One day I was horrified to find a heroin cooking kit on my wall.   Fast food containers and cans were constantly being dumped over my wall or in the area of the shelter and our lives were being affected by the noisy and unruly behaviour of the boys who spent their evenings there.    Eventually, having reported vehicles to the police and petitioning both  the council and the bus company we were at our wits end when finally removal was agreed.   The men came to take the shelter away and replace it with a flag on a pole as we requested and they told me that they are spending a lot of their time removing shelters because of similar problems and according to them the druggies often throw their used needles onto the shelter roof so they pose a threat to the council workers, who have to take great care to avoid injury.

 

     The day my shelter came down was a jubilant one for us all, the people living opposite it had given up using their front rooms because of the noise and nobody approached the nocturnal inhabitants for fear of intimidation.   You can imagine my delight when I came home that evening and saw a bunch of boys heading to my shelter and apparently the look on their faces was priceless  when they found their 'den' had gone.   I know they will have simply moved on BUT, although I must sound like a nimby, such behaviour is not acceptable and must be stamped out.

 

       The other day I saw a young Asian boy coming out of the pharmacy I had just visited; he was about ten but because he was very big he looked much older as he waddled down the road.    In his hand was a tube of Pringles and as he strolled back from whence he came he jettisoned first the top then the foil seal, both of which he casually dropped as he rammed his paw into the pipe.   I see this sort of behaviour every day and I find it horrifying that people will blithely drop their litter without any concern for who is watching or where it lands.

 

     Nowadays people really do waddle about; they make their way grasping polystyrene boxes from which they fork the contents into their faces after which they abandon the containers at will.   I wonder  why someone hasn't begun marketing 'on the go trays' like the ones usherettes used in cinemas.   Back in the day we bought ices and lollies from the ladies who wore a tray that had a strap that went around the neck leaving them hands-free to sell their wares.     Imagine the modern day scene, people could stuff all manner of fast foodstuffs into their faces with greater ease and less chance of losing their lunch through spillage.  

 

     All this consumption begs the obvious question... If one eats food on foot are the calories cancelled?      I doubt that people adjust their intake to include 'on the go food' they've just absorbed.  Everywhere I look I see folk stuffing all manner of food in and generally their consumption is reflected in their body type.  I know someone who always went to get fish and chips for her colleagues and came back saying "I don't know why they always give me such a large portion!"  and I remember the look she shot at me when I challenged it and said how do you know that the big portion is for you?   Because her name was written on the wrapper - that's why - and I had been 'looked' to death!

 

     Not only are we suffering from high volumes of littering but excessive piggery is also a serious social concern.   I watched a recent episode of one of those 'On the dole and.....' programmes and there was a recurring theme as two of the subjects said the same thing - "I'm on benefits, I can't afford to eat good food"   Can that really be so?   The subjects of such programmes are often morbidly obese and thus they are incapable of working.  In the main they all seem to smoke and have big 'F-off' plasma televisions and surely if you have had stars tattooed all over your face you have made yourself intentionally unemployable.     My heart is not hardened to people in dire straits but I do marvel at the immaculate manicures and HD eyebrows of the young women who cannot provide proper food for their multi fathered broods of children that require council housing.    Why is it that children and dogs  are often the hapless victims of such poor life management? 

 
   I shop in Lidl and when they first opened locally  it was almost necessary to wear a false moustache to go in for fear of being 'spotted' and someone did once say to me "Margo, you shop in Lidl?" to which I replied ..."so do you apparently!"    

 

     Food snobbery is seriously troubling to me, I know I like a regular supply of fresh earrings but I refuse to make an almost ten mile round trip to Waitrose when Morrison's is on the doorstep as is the case for one person that I know because he seems to think somewhere like Lidl is beneath him and it appears that he has never heard of those round brown things called potatoes that one peels and beat into a wonderful fluffy mash, he buys his ready made.   Lidl's baked goods are excellent and I find their produce very good too and although their ranges are limited and sometimes foreign their wares are of good quality. 

 

     When I was at secondary school we had a flat where we would spend a week running our daytime lives.   We budgeted, shopped, made beds, ironed and washed up leaving the flat only to go home at the end of the day.   During that time we managed our lives in a very productive way and had a ball in the process.   These days life skills seem to be very low on the list of priorities and they need so much more knowledge to survive these days that they get homework early and are being pushed into after school activities and are cramming for success.   

 

     The system seems to be letting youngsters down in a vital area, discipline.   When I taught I had no means of discipline except sending students out of the room.   Each year I would tell them this and advise them that under no circumstances would I send anyone out because, unlike in my day, they weren't allowed to stand outside the door, they would just take off.   Discipline is necessary for all of us, it makes us truly human and we become a part of our society and that is a serious problem in modern life. 

 

     In my schooldays, if we had the ruler or the strap our parents would often know about it before we'd reached home and one or both of them would be waiting, arms folded intent on an explanation.   Despite there being few telephones they always seemed to know and we also knew that as soon as they found out, maybe by letter a few days later, we were in trouble.    The automatic assumption would be that we had cheeked our teacher and we'd get a thick ear or be spanked.   Today's parents will bounce up to school and many have threatened and actually hit teachers for chastising their little 'sunbeam'.   Dammit teaching is hard enough but without any discipline it became a nightmare and in the long term the kids are suffering.   They have temper tantrums and think that they are untouchable, as indeed they are.   Then in recent years some schools have had to request that mothers don't take their kids to the school gates in their pyjamas and dressing gowns - What is going on, littering, piggery and bad behaviour are all reaching epidemic proportions in the UK?