I spend a few minutes each Sunday morning before Mass starts picking up garbage from the grounds of St. William of York. I have gathered plastic and glass bottles, fast food boxes, drink cartons, candy wrappings, a woman's purse, beer and coke cans, plastic toys, leaflets, newspapers, various small garments, shoes, plastic bags, bicycle parts, a television, fencing panels, condoms, a child's scooter, hub caps, traffic cones, cigarette packets, cigarette butts and countless fragments of broken glass. Even down on your knees with dustpan and brush, it is near impossible to remove the latter completely and you can see lots more glinting like diamonds when the sun is at the appropriate angle.The scariest item was a needle exchange kit (unused, as far as I could tell) and the biggest and heaviest was a stack of scaffolding poles dumped by a dodgy roof repairer. I took the exchange kit back to the local drugstore for safe disposal - it was still in their plastic bag. But the scaffolding poles took some serious effort to remove them to the local refuse dump.
You obviously can't leave such objects lying around for both cosmetic and health and safety reasons, especially in premises open to children. It is a depressing revelation about the complete lack of respect for public spaces, even consecrated public areas. But garbage always provides a fascinating insight into society, if only to illustrate how wealthy a country must be to casually dump so much raw material.
At the beginning of April I saw a huge queue snaking out of the Oracle shopping mall. The queue was people who had waited for hours to get tickets for the Reading Rock Festival. Even though the Festival is not held until late August, all the tickets had allegedly gone already - unless you go on Ebay and pay an arm and a leg (See below for further rip-off details). Where the queue had been there was the most appalling mess of discarded bags, drinks containers and food wrappings dumped by the fans during their long vigil. Just after I saw the mess, a team of council workers arrived with brushes, bags, a large road sweeping vehicle and a small sidewalk sweeping vehicle and cleared it with admirable speed and efficiency.It was a microcosm of the debris left by the real Festival. The only time I have ever been to the
Festival was in 1989, when I helped man the Christian outreach tent. After the Festival, which runs only from Friday evening to Sunday evening, the garbage beggared belief. Plastic bags, ground sheets, huge water containers, paper galore; the shambles stretched in all directions as far as the eye could see across the huge site. I thought it would take most of the months until the 1990 festival to pick it up. But there is a huge well organised operation to clear it away in a week or so.A new store has just opened on Caversham Road, on the direct route from the railway station to the festival site. It is one of the rapidly-growing Aldi chain of budget food stores. Like their budget rivals, Lidl, they are also German and very well positioned to take advantage of the economic downturn, when people hunt for bargains. (The third big German supermarket chain, Kaiser, has not yet arrived in the UK - their name carries unhappy WW1 connotations..... But they are huge at home - there are 155 branches in the Berlin area alone.)
Aldi's introductory offers include a complete "Festival pack": a tent, two sleeping bags and two ground covers for a total of £9.99. At that price, it is not worth taking the pack home after the festival and no doubt there will be even more non-degradable garbage abandoned afterward.
Now that the festival has actually started, you can see the indescribable mess already accumulating. I drove behind two large vans, each towing a large caravan, en route to the site three days before the start of the music. One was the Chinese take-away caravan, the other a burger-and-kebabs caravan. So that's two more heaps of fast-food wrapping.
The festival site is beside the river on the north side of Reading and the nearest supermarkets are over the river in the suburb of Caversham. So you see a procession of youngsters coming back over
Caversham Bridge loaded with plastic bags from the supermarkets. If there are 70,000 festival goers and each gets only only one plastic bag and half leave that bag as litter......Holy Cow, that's 35,000 plastic bags for starters.It is not just the lightweight litter. One of the supermarkets, Waitrose, had a guy stationed in the middle of Caversham Bridge to grab back all the shopping carts which the festival goers were using to transport the mountains of drinks and groceries. So there were two large groups of shopping carts either side of the bridge waiting to be wheeled back to the store. We have two lovely rivers in Reading, the Thames and the
Kebnnet, plus any number of picturesque smaller tributaries. These all act as rubbish magnets, with abandoned shopping carts being a prominent ingredient. As they are well made and coated with rust resistant material they can stay in a waterway indefinitely until the next periodic clear out. You can bet that many of Waitrose's expensive carts would have ended up in the Thames unless swiftly recovered. And the path along the south bank of the Thames leading to the Festival site is already strewn with drinks cans and fast food debris, to be cleared up at public expense.Once the Festival starts, the graffiti artists are out in force as well, adding to the £120,000 a year the local council already spends in scrubbing down walls and other vertical surfaces. That's not to mention the noise pollution created by the multi-megawatt amplifiers. The main recipients are the people in the million pound plus riverside homes on the north bank, but it easily spreads to my humble home two miles away on a hilltop; sound bounces in unpredictable ways all over town. And then there's the glorious pollution and traffic congestion as traffic converges from all over the country.
Obviously somebody's making truckloads of money off this. With tickets at £145 ($280) a go just for admission, there's obviously still money to burn in this country despite the impending recession. And that's excluding food, camping gear, souvenirs and travel to the site. Some people were ripped off £145 by bogus internet sites and STILL descended on the on-site ticket office, queing for hours from early morning to pay another £145 to the legitimate sellers for the remaining 3,000 tickets. No wonder they could afford to pay £1 million just for a temporary bridge spanning the Thames, linking to a campsite on the north bank. We have been waiting 80 years for a third Thames bridge in town and a temporary one springs up in days. I am remained of General Patton's Rhine crossing in 1945. The US Army engineers in Patton's sector alone put 5 bridges across the Rhine in 24 hours, under threat of enemy attack. If the US Army had been run by Reading Council, WW2 would still be in full swing. This temporary bridge is a rare example of recycling - it was allegedly made from structures used for the stage on Madonna's last world tour....
Any Christian presence in this pagan celebration? Well, the warmth and hospitality of local people has been evident in some places. The Baptist Church in the centre of Caversham, across the road from Waitrose supermarket, was holding open house, with festival goers welcomed in for coffee, sandwiches, toilets and a chance to recharge their mobile phones. Another church on the south bank was offering coffee sessions in the morning. But, given the sheer size of the affair, the Christian input is very marginal.
Given the size of Great Britain and the 60+ million people squeezed into it, it is a wonder that there is any land left unoccupied by rubbish tips and landfill sites. There's even less spare space this weekend.....
