David Sedaris is my new hero. Not because he’s such a funny writer, but because he’s obsessed with litter. He told a group of MPs last week that he spends up to five hours a day picking up fast food containers and fag ends around his home in Pulborough, west Sussex. Thanks to his unstinting labours, he’s become a local hero and has had a rubbish lorry named after him.
I’ve some way to go before I qualify for such an honour, but I do my bit. For instance, on Monday I spent an hour clearing the litter from the flowerbed outside the West London Free School in Hammersmith. This was rubbish left by passers-by, not the pupils. Sedaris said what infuriated him the most were crisp packets tied into a knot and stuffed into soft drink cans, but I can trump that. Among the detritus I came across was a fresh pile of human excrement. All I can say is that I’m glad the individual responsible wasn’t squatting in the flowerbed when we had our school open day last October.
According to Sedaris, shoppers at Tesco Metro drop more litter than Waitrose customers, an observation that got him into trouble with the Labour MP Simon Danczuk, who branded him a ‘snob’. But there’s no getting around the fact that the worst offenders are more likely to be at the bottom of the social pyramid than the top. I spend about ten minutes every evening picking up litter in my street in Acton and I’ve never come across an empty Evian bottle or a discarded carton of coconut water. No, it’s cans of Kronenbourg and Red Bull, along with polystyrene food containers. Sedaris complained about picking up more Mayfair cigarette boxes than any other brand in Pulborough, but in west London it’s Superkings.
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