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I was walking back from my daily commuter train – the 17.15 from London Bridge to East Grinstead. From leaving at the rear door of the 3rd carriage (the closest door to the stairs at Upper Warlingham station, I began performing my usual power walk past the other suited contenders up the hill, eager to overtake them and claim Olympic Gold at Rio 2016 for Team GB (yup, that’s how mature my thoughts are).
On this particular occasion, I was thinking about the rubbish that was strewn on my 3 minute amble up the road and how I saw the same stuff all the time.
I always think how disgusting this is and aren’t Tandridge council supposed to provide us with street cleaning services on a relatively regular basis? I couldn’t see that such a service was operating here.
And then, Michael Jackson came into my head.
More specifically, I thought of his song ‘Man in the Mirror’ that I only discovered after his death when I was living in New Zealand. These chorus lyrics came to mind:
‘If you wanna make the world a better place,
Take a look at yourself and make that change.’
Okay, so I wasn’t thinking, ‘hmmm, maybe I should clear up my own appearance and then the streets might clean up theirs’. But what I was thinking was ‘hmmm, why should I stand around and complain about something but not be prepared to do anything about it?’.
So, 10 minutes later, I was out of my second-hand suit and into my first-hand trakkie-bottoms and school leavers hoody.
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An hour and 15 minutes flew by as I used my grabber and bin bag to gather whatever detritus my eyes could find. What amazed me was just how much stuff there is hidden away. Shift a little bit of natural growth in a hedge and you will wander at the world of discarded packaging you will come across. By far the most common items are drinks cans but here is a little itinerary of more random stuff I found:
- golf ball
- tennis ball
- mountain bike wheel
- scaffolding poll
- set of number plates among individual plates as well
- baby’s dummy
- half a floor brush
- l’Occitane hand cream
- HB pencil
- cable stripped of its insides
A couple of these items suggest criminal activity so might look into handing them over to the Police. Why would somebody chuck a set of car registration plates underneath a bit of undergrowth in a hedge? And why would a very similar hedge host the remains of what could have once been copper wiring. These Surrey roads are a lot more murky that I once imagined…
Some of the more fascinating items:
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Ever wanted to see what a wing mirror fragmented into a billion pieces looks like?
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Old school Sprite can. Best before July 1996. I would have been a mere 5 years old when this was mostly consumed and chucked.
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Stella Artois can with snails it. When trying to shake the snails out, they were far too big to leave from the entrance that they must have once entered. Either that, or this Belgian beer has some distinctly French ingredients…
I would have gathered a far greater haul of items including traffic cones, road signs and more but the effective fencing provided a great area for litter to develop and become very difficult to remove.
Nonetheless, I am quite pleased with my achievement. The most part of the other commuters not really acknowledging my presence, the only one to stop and ask what I was doing was a justifiably bemused father of mine. Most commuters, like myself, spend that journey up the hill, staring blankly at the pavement below them. I hope that now many of them think, ‘hmmm, this is a bit tidier than normal’.
Even if you cannot get your hands on as professional and amusing a grabber as I had, I recommend that you go out and clear a bit of litter in your local environment. Doesn’t have to be much, but it can make a world of difference to your mood as you travel through it, and hopefully, the mood of many others too. Plus, you never know what treasures you might unearth…
Pick litter and make MJ proud!
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