#smokingisnottheonlyrubbish

Why are we so mucky in south Wales?

As Steve and I work our way round Wales looking at tomb carvings and interesting bits of building stone, we are tasked by our daughter to photograph smoking-related litter. She works for AshWales’s Filter project and they are building up a map of smoking rubbish in Wales https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=204821950365946795220.0004e0999aa42298c0d23&msa=0&ie=UTF8&t=h&ll=51.460639,-3.375893&spn=0.164281,0.468636&source=embed

You will see that most of the little flags are in the Cardiff area and up the valleys. The Filter team thought that was because they are based in Cardiff, and they have been trying to record smoking litter elsewhere in Wales. But it took me a lot of hard work to find the few photos I took around St Davids in August. Visits to Brecon and the Marches produced no photos at all. Likewise a trip to the Vale of Clwyd. Not just no smoking-related litter, very little litter at all. Meanwhile, the lanes and woods around Cardiff are full of it. I do a bit of freelance litter-picking in the woods above my house but I’ve given up on the roads – you can clear a section and a week later it’s as if you hadn’t bothered.

Why? It can’t be poverty and despair because Cardiff is one of the more prosperous areas of Wales. What is really sad is that we seem to have lost our pride. We used to have a saying about not messing on your own doorstep (well, we put it a bit stronger than that but you know what I mean). So much has got better in south Wales – the harshness of the chapel culture has been liberalised, there’s less male chauvinism – but along with the bathwater of patriarchy we seem to have chucked out the baby of our self-respect.

Most of the rubbish comes from what I would call junk food. Longwood Drive, off the Coryton roundabout where the M4 meets the A470, has several outlets (better not name names) and the volunteers from the Forest Farm conservation centre pick up at least a bin bag of rubbish A DAY there.

Shouldn’t the people whose logos are emblazoned over this unsightly mess be just the least bit concerned? After all, one burger is much like another, one cheap lager is much like another. So what they are selling is an image – ‘buy our product and be like these beautiful people strolling hand in hand into the golden sunset’ … but instead what they are saying is ‘Buy our product and be like these sad little souls whose idea of sensual  gratification is a six-pack of lager and a big packet of crisps, and whose idea of really wild iconoclastic behaviour is to chuck their rubbish in the nearest hedgerow’.

We need a way of getting the polluter to pay.

But we also need a way to get our self-respect back.