Wednesday, 2 November 2011	INDEX
Autumn leaves
When I was a kid one of the greatest pleasures of autumn was kicking the leaves along the road. The sound of those crisp leaves and the feel of them against your shoes, socks and legs (in those days I wore short trousers more often) was quite unique. But today we try our best to deny the children this pleasure. The council hires an extremely expensive contractor to collect the leaves (I think they use a mechanical blower) and bag them. They are then expensively collected and taken for disposal, presumably in landfill. Strangely when it comes to dealing with more offensive substances (like the stuff dogs leave) the council is less assiduous, though my old friend Denise Liunberg did devise a poop scoop scheme for dog owners in Waltham Forest that still works, up to a point. You'd have thought with the huge cuts in local government expenditure (the council where I live, the London borough of Waltham Forest, has to save more than £50m) the collection of autumn leaves could be abandoned this year, or at least delayed until there is some rain and the leaves become unpleasantly saturated. A shame but that appears to be the world we live in today. Posted by Jonathan Brind at 07:30 1 comment:
Wednesday, 2 November 2011	INDEX