Bog Off!

This looks like it’s going to be just another one of those ‘when I was a kid’ blogs, but it’s important. It’s important because along with Britishness and a love of our island home we lost so much common sense that if we were to gather it all up in one heap we could use it to fix the world. There you go, straight away; fixing, for a start. We used to fix things if they broke. Okay I admit that sometimes we just kept those things in the shed intending to fix them but the thought was there. Now we don’t even put up the pretence.

A source of income, 'when I was a kid', especially below the then legal working age of thirteen, was collecting empty glass bottles. This may come as a shock to today’s throwaway society but back then a deposit was paid on bottles of pop, said deposit recoverable on return. We’d get our penny back on a bottle and the bottles – wait for it, young ‘uns – would be sent back to the bottling plants, washed and refilled! Imagine, using a container more than once! My heart sinks every time I have to empty the bins at work because they are filled with little more than the air contained inside all those bloody plastic bottles you all discard with impunity.

We waste so much, now. Or at least we do at source. Now we pay others to recover the raw materials for us, preferably far from our sight so that our superficial view of the world won’t be sullied by an appreciation of how things actually work. Because we don’t like to dwell on those functions we deem beneath us we unthinkingly waste water, electricity, heat, food and tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of materials that have cost time and money to procure. We even waste people because we decided some time ago that it is cheaper to discard our idle and replace them with new ones, preferably with exotic provenance.

So it’s nice to hear of the EU’s latest venture into recycling with their exciting Buy-One-Get-One-Free offer. I’m a little hazy on the details but I hear it involves our Royal Navy and other scavengers scouring the Aegean coastlines and gathering up the spent refugees, whereupon it returns them to, I presume, some form of refurbishment facility where they will be transformed from undesirable flotsam to some form of useable product and then sent to the thriving slave markets of Europe. Or, indeed, Turkey.

This is an enterprise we should all get behind. I’m sure the offer can’t apply only to the discards of the Hellenic Isles. With a bit of effort we could easily get together a whole shipment and send them back to Turkey for reprocessing – why, there must be a good few container-loads in Calais alone and the mayor did say they were going to put them on a ferry. So come on, true Brits, clean up your neighbourhoods and send the rubbish back for processing.