ACCORDING to Keats, autumn is the time of mists and mellow fruitfulness; Chaucer tells us that spring is when all folk long to go on pilgrimages and winter’s the season of joy, overspending and mawkishness. That just leaves summer; and these days that’s a time of festivals. All around the country we see events showcasing music, culture, sport, religion, food and all manner of other things that people like to get up to in the open air. Incredible as it seems, those events even take place during an Ashes summer!

We have our share in this part of the world. They’re packed to the gunwales with people having a great time and behaving like civilised, albeit excited, human beings. Three in particular spring to my mind – Glastonbury, the solstice at Stonehenge and Devizes Beer Festival. Of course they vary in scale and reputation (Michael Eavis can only dream of the music budget that Alan and Ian have at DBF) but they have many things in common; they’ve all been around for a while, people love them and they take a lot of time and effort to organise. Oh, and they all seem to be attended by the same tiny percentage of self-obsessed and sociopathic folk who make the organisers wonder why they bother and have most rational people shaking their heads in disbelief.

I’m not talking about people out to cause trouble. That’s largely a thing of the past due to increased and better security. No, I’m talking about what is, on the face of it, a much lower level problem. Litter.

We all know and accept that where a large group of people gather, there will be litter. Most normal people put their rubbish in bins or take it home with them. But stuff gets dropped by accident, wind blows wrappers and papers away and we can be forgetful. These things happen; we all expect it. But it’s been getting out of hand lately. Most of us will have seen pictures of the sea of rubbish just dumped where people sat or stood at Stonehenge and Pilton. Devizes Beer Festival had a similar problem. Sure, it was a much smaller event so there was less of what our American chums would call trash but we only had volunteers (and some customers, like Lloyd the egg man) to clear it up. At the end of a hard, tiring, but rewarding, day that was a real smack in the chops.

Why do people do it? We had signs up asking people to take their rubbish home. If they didn’t want to do that then we had loads of black plastic sacks for people to use. We even had beer festival stalwart, Max, doing regular litter-picks with his brand new litter-picker. Perhaps next year we’ll buy him a cattle prod.

If it gets much worse then we’ll struggle to collect all the rubbish ourselves, the site will look a disgrace and Wiltshire Council will tell us to sling our hooks. A few people will have spoilt it for everyone.

We have the same problem on the Green in Devizes. The town council tried to sort it out by putting more bins in place. It’s almost impossible to leave the Green without passing within ten feet of a bin. So pick your rubbish up and put it in the bin!

The kids (and it’s largely, but not exclusively, youngsters) must do it knowing it will wind the rest of us up and perhaps I’m giving them the sort of reaction they want. I guess we used to do the same, but in other ways. And not everyone can do what Janet, former landlady of the Hare and Hounds used to do; she’d write the names of people she’d sold take-out bottles to on the labels so they could be traced.

Then again, perhaps I’m just imagining the problem. Like bad drivers, we all know they’re out there, but you never meet anyone who admits to being a litter lout. Because even they know it’s wrong.