Is This Yours?

If you're out to celebrate, why let thoughts of environmental responsibility hold you back? Valentine's Day (or, as it should be called, Saint Valentine's Day) is thought to be another occasion for excess. So send off not just one balloon to fall towards earth at some unknown and possibly unspoiled site, but eight or nine tied together, one of them being larger than the others and heart-shaped. After all she's worth it.

It's now common to find brightly coloured, usually deflated, balloons in the hills. This could remind us of another welcome feature of modern life - that plastic bags are commonplace even on the ocean floor.
Dropping your litter to the ground these days may be frowned upon, even bottles and cans, though one or two of the local mountain bikers have few qualms. Could there be a craze soon for tying your unwanted litter to balloons and launching it into the air?

Farming can also be a major generator of litter. It's rare not to find plastic of some kind in the pasture land. The cow this morning was getting the last bit of nutrition from a bag - probably the livestock feed bag recently found in a nearby tree.

There's an easy connection between litter and clutter. I notice that the Council's website now has a piece about Street Clutter. Nothing though about the ultimate street clutter, the private motor car, which anyway is the main cause of all the clutter around. Out here though I call the stop-gap fence repair above farm clutter. It was installed as an emergency repair more than a year ago and no sign that a permanent replacement is even being thought of. Not far off the farm clutter that we hoped had gone for good has now returned.