NOT for the first time, I’m gong to talk rubbish. No, I’m not going to discuss Wiltshire Council’s fortnightly collections, which I happen to think work reasonably well, but litter and other such nuisances. Now I know this matter might not be up there with Brexit, cricket or the environment but it does affect people’s lives on a day-to-day basis. So I’ll leave the big issues to those who know what they’re talking about (or claim to) and take it from there.

It’s traditional to start this sort of rant, complaint, moan (call it what you will) with a statement about how everything was so much better ‘back in my day’. But there are two reasons why I can’t bring myself to do that.

First, when I last checked, I was still alive so this is still ‘my day’.

Second, I think that in this case things weren’t better 30, 40 or 50 years ago. Maybe Wiltshire was pristine in that golden age but I was in London then and it was a right dirty old dump. There were old newspapers, fag packets and sweet wrappers blowing around everywhere.

As long ago as 1954, the Women's Institute passed a resolution at their AGM to start a national anti-litter campaign. This resulted in the ‘Keep Britain Tidy’ campaign, so clearly there was a need back then. And what about those signs on lampposts that said ‘kerb your dog’? No ‘please clean up after your mutt’ back then; oh no, instead people were encouraged to get their hound to park his breakfast next to the pavement!

Maybe we just expect things to be cleaner, smarter and altogether more pleasant than in days of yore. Perhaps it’s just nostalgia – another thing that’s not as good as it used to be. But whatever the reason, we sill get narked about litter. And rightly so!

There’s the odd time when we drop something accidentally and it blows away before we can pick it up but most the time littering is a result of laziness, a lack of consideration for others or just plain old gittishness. And if that isn’t a word, it should be.

Amongst the young, perhaps it’s also a way of winding the old folk up? Take the Green in Devizes. For years, kids have been eating and drinking there and leaving their rubbish behind.

The town council then took the sensible step of putting in so many bins that you can barely walk off the Green without bumping into one. And that made next to no difference.

So perhaps it’s time for a different approach. Most of the rubbish is left during the week and those that leave it know that it’ll be cleared away ready for them to come back to a spiffingly spruce space the next day.

Therefore I’d suggest that the town council forgets about cleaning that area during the week for a while. Get rid of the mess on a Saturday morning when the families come out. If the young ‘uns want to sit in a pigsty, let them! Goodness ... I sound like my old mum there! And yes, I know that it’s not just our otherwise splendid youth that leave the mess in the week, but I covered those ne’er do wells in my previous paragraph.

Litter is a nasty and unsightly issue but it doesn’t come close to the problem of people failing to clean up after their dogs. There’s a thoroughfare into the Market Place that a mate and I always refer to as DSA – Dog Muck Alley. This is a public health issue and we, as a society, need to clamp down on it.

I find it difficult to write about this subject without going off on one so perhaps I’d better stop now. Suffice it to say that I’d be happy to see the removal of the disgusting creatures that are responsible for such mess. And then we could find decent homes for their dogs.