The weather forecast told us that on Saturday it would rain and there would be strong winds. On Sunday there would be more rain and it would get colder. Just great!
What with the foot and mouth outbreak stopping many of the rescue events, (as gloomy a beginning as you could imagine), and then the weather ganging up on us, it would have seemed that things were stacked against us. I mean, who in their right mind would voluntarily go clearing rubbish on such a weekend. Well apparently we have enough people who are prepared to turn out and do it.
Some of the people who turned up had joined us last year when it was a lovely spring day. This year looked as though we were not to be so lucky and it needed a certain grit to stay with it, but given the forecast we didn't do so badly. In fact, the rain held off, but it was cold and damp and a bit windy.
We wanted to concentrate on clearing the land at the Recreation Road Car Park, behind the Co-op. Last year this was a disgrace. This year, while not pretty, it was nowhere near as bad as last year - this in itself was consoling. Best of all a few valiant crocuses (crocii?) were popping up where last year there had been a smelly old carpet. A few daffodils were also showing. So although there was lots of rubbish here, we did feel that last year's efforts had managed a substantial improvement over the year. Depressingly though we did manage to fill the skip by the end of the morning. Soon the rubbish had been removed by our now familiar three jolly chaps with a dustcart (fuelled by liquified natural gas - of course). By this time people were also clearing School Road and in front of the Library.
We continued after lunch. Sarah and Liz went to tackle the muddy hedge by the Triangle. It was full of Kentucky Fried Chicken wrappers (surely not a good place to find a logo), sweet papers and cigarette boxes. They were walking back to pile it all in the skip when a smartly dressed young lady stopped to see what they were doing. She asked why they weren’t recycling the cans. With great alacrity they said that she was welcome to help them sort through the rubbish that they had collected and extract what she considered to be suitable for recycling. She declined but continued to harangue them about the fact that they should be recycling the rubbish that they had collected!
Time for the raffle for all the volunteers. Lots of happy winners. We all went home.
This year we had decided to go and help out the people doing their clear up in McIlroy Park and the final afternoon was spent attacking Gipsy Lane. We were joined by two young lads, Nicolas and Frank, who worked brilliantly. What a shame that there weren’t more like minded young people. Although the evidence is that the worst of the rubbish is from adult fly tippers - who tip serious rubbish into the woods, builders rubbish, old furniture, in fact anything that they don’t want. The mindlessness is astonishing, especially when you consider that household waste is collected for free. OK there are plently of drinks cans, vodka bottles (children’s rubbish?) and crisp packets, Probably, much of the lightweight rubbish is blown around. But shopping trolleys don’t blow around, nor do dustbins or bags of concrete. What possesses people to deliberately take these things into our woods and nature reserves? But there again, Gypsy Lane was not quite the disaster that it had been when we attacked it last year. Perhaps, though depressing that the job needs doing, the RESCUE event does seem to be having an effect.
In last year’s report I related the following story (which is reprinted here for the benefit of those who didn’t read it then)
“And then home. Up the hill and feeling pretty pleased, not to mention a little smug, that everywhere did seem that much better, cleaner and greener. Across the park thinking about a hot bath. On a seat in the park was the proverbial little old lady. She caught my attention huddled over her bag - rummaging about in it. And then she took some paper out of the bag and threw it to the ground - in our nice clean park! She was sitting no more than a foot from a waste bin!
Oh, education, education, education. Someone should do something about these little old ladies.”
Well it must be said that this year we had stirling efforts from little old ladies as well as the young lads. Perhaps someone out there that we don’t know about is educating the little old ladies.