We just returned from town after what should have been a relaxing walk in the warm sunshine.

What this young lady did was unwrap a lollypop and blithely drop the paper on the pavement.  My wife picked it up and deposited it in a nearby receptacle with the appropriate tisk-tisking and we continued on.  Shortly after, one of the young boys did the same thing.  This time, my wife picked up the paper and gave it back to him (they were young enough that, if they pulled knives, we might have been able to hold our own—we would never have been so foolish with someone 16 or 17).  She asked him to put it in the bin as littering was giving them a bad reputation.  No shouting, no chastising, just cause, effect and a request to do the right thing.

So we all set off, with them looking back every few seconds to see if we were following.  We were.  So the boy went out of his way to walk past two bins where he made a point of not putting the trash in them, then veered into a gaming shop where, no doubt, he dropped it on the floor.

I have written about this before, but it is one of the saddest things about living among the British: they live in an astoundingly beautiful country, yet the treat it as their own, personal rubbish pit.  The cities in America and, especially, Canada, are not filled with litter the way they are here.  Don’t the British have any sense of pride in their country?  And if they do, why don’t they teach it to their kids?

It really annoys me, almost as much as what happened to my friend, NFAH, who was sent out of her own meeting to make photocopies for some guy just because she was the only woman in the room.  Now, I’m not saying this wouldn’t happen in America—sadly, it would—but at least there you are not required to address the offending dipstick as “Sir” just because he was knighted.