Long life | 11 February 2016

I am sure that the Queen disapproves of litter as much as anyone else, but she’s hardly ever exposed to it. There isn’t litter around at Buckingham Palace or at Windsor Castle or at any of her other homes. And when she goes away on a visit, her destination is always assiduously cleaned and tidied up in advance. She is, I suspect, almost the only person in Britain who barely knows what litter looks like. Yet we are all being asked to volunteer to spend the first weekend of March picking up litter everywhere in Britain to make the entire country clean before her 90th birthday in April.

My personal invitation to ‘Clean for the Queen’, as the campaign is called, arrived in the form of an email from the Northamptonshire branch of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), which is one of several organisations — Keep Britain Tidy, the Women’s Institute, and so on — that are backing the magazine Country Life in this initiative.