Bryson and The Times

[mr endon]

It is estimated that more than 30 million tonnes of litter are collected from the streets each year and 1.3 million pieces of litter are dropped on the roads each weekend.

Crikey, aren't we industrious?
Why not pop over and remind The Times (and Bryson) that Matthew Parris has already delivered on this issue (Dec 27th), finding that ludicrous, brutish, monstrous and insolent jerk cyclists are responsible for our roadside litter, and that decapitation via piano wire booby traps is the solution?
 
You may want to query why The Times has lost its nerve and is helping target the poor beleaguered British motorist.

[peter carter 2]

Oh do target them

If you have seem the rubbish on the  road side of Essex then you would see his point.

Some of the rubbish in Epping forest is odd. There is almost always a porn mat or parts thereof on the road side...

[Sergeant Pluck]

Funny that. I've only ridden through Epping Forest once in daylight and indeed there was a "porn mat"  . Hadn't seen one since I was a nipper.

[gordon taylor]

I pick up litter on our local lanes every single week. We even have a picker-up tool which we take on walks. The amount of roadside litter in this country, as Bryson say, is utterly beyond comprehension.

It drives me crazy - I've twice had blazing stand-up rows with people who've dropped litter in front of me in town.

The Parris article was an abomination, but it was actually prompted because he was out collecting litter from the Derbyshire lanes.

[Sergeant Pluck]

At home in Northern Ireland motorists are very tidy: they collect all their rubbish in a plastic bag, only throwing it out of the window when it's full.

[MSeries]

What is  a porn mat ?

[Sergeant Pluck]

It's a new term to me  but I am guessing it is the papier mache mess formed by someone's collection of porno mags when exposed to the weather for a while.

[Sergeant Pluck]

 

Of course it's more likely to be a typo of mag... but it's a good typo.

[Adam]

It's a new term to me  but I am guessing it is the papier mache mess formed by someone's collection of porno mags when exposed to the weather for a while.

I assumed it was a "used" porn magazine.

[Sergeant Pluck]

Kinda difficult to tell when they're in a big pile of semi-dissolved glossy paper with only random body parts visible.

Anyway...

Epping Forest must be the last bastion of porn in printed form.

Let history show that the first use of the term "porn mat"  was on YACF.

[Gandalf]

I assumed it was yet another sexual foible I was unaware of, where you get to wipe your feet on some porn starlet's jigglers or something.

[rogerzilla]

I was highly amused to see a jazz mag called "Swank" in the petrol station yesterday.   They didn't have to think too long and hard (oo-er) about that title.

[Cunobelin]

I was highly amused to see a jazz mag called "Swank" in the petrol station yesterday.   They didn't have to think too long and hard (oo-er) about that title.

Poor Hilary!

[ian]

Funny that. I've only ridden through Epping Forest once in daylight and indeed there was a "porn mat"  . Hadn't seen one since I was a nipper.

Highlight of our childhood forays into the woods was the inadvertent discovery of discarded pornography. I had assumed the internet had put an end to that. I am pleased to hear something of yore has survived into the great information age. It's like finding your fax machine still works (and that's what the beeping noise is). Well, actually, when you're thirteen finding porn is probably a lot better than finding you've got a very out-of-date fax waiting. Possibly this rule holds when you are 37 too.

Litter does piss me off though. On a ride the other day, some idiot just threw a half-full coke can out of their car window, leaving it to bounce down the road. Popping into Tesco on the way back, the usual 4x4 driving ijit in the disabled spot happily shoved the wrapping from whatever they were eating out the window before driving off. This is fairly typical. And this, being south London means there's drifts of fried rat packaging everywhere, along with the drink cans and other sundry accompaniments. Left to our own devices, given a couple of weeks, we'd be neck deep in fast food detritus. Archeologists of future will identify us by the compressed layer of discarded Morley's Fried Chicken boxes. We'll be Morley-Man. A horrible, horrible thought and legacy.

And of course, if you've got an old TV, stereo, fridge, whatever - the two best ways to dispose of it are to leave it around the corner, or find the local green area and lob or lever it over the fence for everyone else to admire.

I always pick up what I can (litter, not porn) but it doesn't seem to make much difference.

[pcolbeck]

I do a fair bit of driving and over the last year the amount of litter alongside the road has started to get to me. The A64 between the A1 and York past Tadcaster looks like pictures form Beruit. Every tree is swaddled in plastic bags and the density of rubbish on the verge is depressing. Large swathes of the A1. M62 and M1 are similar.
I can accept that people are dropping more litter but not that the rate at which they drop it is increasing exponentially each year. Five years ago things weren't half so bad. Are councils picking up less roadside litter to cut costs ?

[gordon taylor]

I feel sorry for the councils who have to clean up this mess. It must cost a fortune to get the verges clean, and within a week the tossers will have it looking like a tip again. We have a strange sub-culture at work here, who seem to think that it is right and proper for someone else to clean up after them. Bill Bryson thought that half of the population drop litter, but only ten percent were hard-core and unreachable.

In the USA, rural roads are adopted and cleared by community groups, individual families or local businesses. There are signposts every so often that advertise who is doing the good work.

[MSeries]

You may want to query why The Times has lost its nerve and is helping target the poor beleaguered British motorist.

I presume they are writing about this because the law is about to change to make the car owner responsible for the dropping of the litter if he doesn't shop the perpetrator.

[Pingu]

The Red Rose of Shetland - discarded McEwan's Export tins on the verges 

[mr endon]

You may want to query why The Times has lost its nerve and is helping target the poor beleaguered British motorist.

I presume they are writing about this because the law is about to change to make the car owner responsible for the dropping of the litter if he doesn't shop the perpetrator.

Yes, but they sound supportive; presumably a pre-condition of Bryson launching his campaign on their pages. Yet this is the same Times that a few short months back was providing a platform for the Blue Queen, Mavis Pariah, to vilify cyclists for the hedgerow litter problem. "Off with their heads!" you may recall.

[Jasmine]

At home in Northern Ireland motorists are very tidy: they collect all their rubbish in a plastic bag, only throwing it out of the window when it's full.

I see this sort of thing quite regularly in both England and Wales whilst I'm out cycling.  Sometimes there'll be a bag every 100 m or so.  I really don't get it though.  Often it looks like someone has gone to the trouble of putting 20-30 empty lager cans into a carrier bag, tie it up, then throw it out the window.  If you are going to chuck it in the road, why go to the effort?  If you've already got it in a bag, is it that difficult to take it home?  Is there something I am missing here?

[Adam]

People see their car as their own space, and don't want the litter in it. Anywhere "outdoors" is seen as communal ground and they feel they've got a right to do what they like.  It's a general lack of social responsibility.  It would need a different emphasis to get the message rammed home.

For example I just couldn't physically drop some litter on the street, as it was drilled into me when I was little, to take it home, and I've passed that message onto my children.  However, some of their friends are dreadful.  If you point it out to them, it's not a problem and they realise what you're saying and pick it up, but the bad impression and the effect on the overall environment that it makes just isn't imprinted in their brains.

Seeing as you can't get parents to follow a rule book, the only answer would be get some social education taught in schools from a very early age to show the bad effect of littering.

[spen666]

I saw a great letter in local Radcliffe on Trent paper

Writer was saying how he has noticed how dirty & how much rubbish there is in the place on a Sunday morning and it is a disgrace the council do not have staff there to clean up the rubbish each sunday.

No mention of the persons causing the mess. I presume this litter and rubbish is a naturally occurring phenomenen [sp?] and not caused by man (or woman). Writer never saw fit to castigate the cause of the problem

[Tiger]

Years ago I was involved in some consumer research about 'Expression of personal freedom' in different societies.
An interesting area was attitudes to litter - suggesting that the act of littering is felt to be an expression of personal freedom against the tyranny of 'society/others'.

I think chucking stuff out of ones car enhances the sense of personal power, freedom, and escape that the car gives. Even moreso with a big 4X4. 

[ian]

At home in Northern Ireland motorists are very tidy: they collect all their rubbish in a plastic bag, only throwing it out of the window when it's full.

I see this sort of thing quite regularly in both England and Wales whilst I'm out cycling.  Sometimes there'll be a bag every 100 m or so.  I really don't get it though.  Often it looks like someone has gone to the trouble of putting 20-30 empty lager cans into a carrier bag, tie it up, then throw it out the window.  If you are going to chuck it in the road, why go to the effort?  If you've already got it in a bag, is it that difficult to take it home?  Is there something I am missing here?

Never understood it either. It's like the folks that seem to drive along several miles of churned up country lane to dump a fridge in the middle of nowhere.

And, with even more impenetrable logic, those folks who take the rare step of cleaning up after their dog, only then to take the filled carrier bag and tie it to a tree branch so it dangles there like some particularly noisome fruit.

There seems to be an increasing assumption that someone else will come along and clean it up. I share communal bins with my neighbours and virtually none of them will bother to break down the cardboard box from their latest large and gleaming item of electronica. If it won't fit in the bin, they just leave it by them. I am not sure what they expect to happen to it. Garbage pixies? It's two minutes' work to break the box down and compress it. I should know, I seem to do it every time.

[Tom M]

Ah, litter [Personal bugbear]...

I shall do my best to refrain from my truly ranting fever that can be reached, but I have to agree with many of the points made.

On my terraced street why are some of these idiots incapable of realising that the green wheely bin is for garden waste only? If you fill it with beer cans and pizza boxes the bin-men will not take it. Ever. So it just sits there blocking the pavement (no they can't be arsed to move it either) in a stand-off. And how do they generate that much rubbish anyway?

And what goes on in people's heads when instead of chucking something to the ground they will carefully place it on a wall or something? It's no different, but they can somehow justify to themselves it isn't littering I guess.

Anyway, back to the happy place...