Whilst out riding in the countryside I saw:

1. Five burnt out cars.
2. Quite a few heaps of builders and household rubbish disfiguring the landscape.
3. A car engine dumped in the middle of a countryside car park.
4. A beer bottle, seemingly tossed out of a car window, lying smashed all over the cycle path.
5. Some portable toilets (used by Army personnel when on training exercises) pushed over onto their sides.

Maybe 5 is possibly being done by kids who get around on bikes but adults must be responsible for the rest. The old car to be burnt out must be driven to the land. A car or lorry is needed to transport the junk, builder’s rubble and old bathroom suites to the chosen bit of countryside. ‘People’ have to be old enough to drive in order to do that.

Probably children or youths are to blame for the following:

1. A couple of schools have been set alight lately. In one case, the damage was so bad that complete demolition of the building was necessary. We only used to joke about the school burning down before the end of the summer holidays. Now it seems that there are those willing to turn it into reality!

2. A pane of glass was smashed in a bus shelter just down the road from where we live. Broken glass was everywhere. This just adds to other forms of vandalism that can be seen on a daily basis.

Empty bottles, paper, crisp packets are thrown into a pond in the park where children from a local school tend to gather at lunchtimes. Accompanying this is the lifebuoy, so if anyone does fall in the water they’ll have to be able to swim to go and grab it. A waste bin in the area has been turned into a charred heap of junk.

Local Councils try hard to provide pleasant parks and facilities in the area. However, there seems to be growing number of people willing to make these efforts amount to nought. Why is this and what can be done?

Rant …moan …rant!

TW be careful not to tar everyone with the same brush - my own "kids" don't drop rubbish and will always clean up after themselves (and others) (especially in the countryside!)
But then my kids were taught to think that way by Boys Brigade and Girl Guides.

It's nothing new though, where I live now is also almost next to where I lived in the early 60's, and I used to see a fascinating series of about 3 very old cars which had been dumped in the ditches at the side of the winding rural road leading to our estate.

Though I was only 5 when we left, I can remember they were there from as long as I could remember (about 2 yrs old, amazingly enough) and may have been there for some years after. I can't see them staying for more than a few weeks now, but the trouble is there may well be more junk replacing it when it's removed nowadays, but it probably varies depending on the area as well.

Hong Kong has introduced new fines for littering. The worst thing you can do to HK people is hit them in the pocket; it seems to be working well. The streets are noteably cleaner.

There are laws here too but I never hear about anyone being caught and prosecuted.

There's a place near us where the road has been re-routed. This has left a dead end for motor traffic where the oiginal road was. At this spot, are the entrances to two cottages. The cottages themselves can just about be seen through the woods. The place is on one of our cycle routes.

There are always items of builders rubble and household junk at the entrances to these cottages. I don't think they are put there by the people who live in the cottages, not unless they are constantly doing building work and were once the proud owners of half a dozen old washing machines, as many refrigerators and loads of other stuff.

The rubbish is always being cleared but, a couple of days later, another lot appears. I feel quite sorry for the people who live there. If I was a resident, I'd be rigging up some automatic cameras to catch whoever was dumping the stuff. I wonder if a prosecution would take place if photographic evidence was presented to the authorities?

On the face of it the problem is perhaps not too apparent. It's only when you leave the car behind and explore the local countryside, either by bike or on foot, that you end up getting as cross about it as I am. We cover about 15 to 17 miles of open countryside and tracks on a typical bike ride. Anywhere that a track is wide enough to get a truck or a car down can be prone to attack from fly tippers or car burners. It's maybe because we explore the area so thoroughly that we see so much of the problem.

There's much that is good about our area. I'm thinking of creating a web site about our locality. Unfortunately it would need to include a section on what is not so good. Maybe I'll split the site into two sections. One called, 'The Nice' and the other called, 'The Nasty'.