LETTERS

Rubbish regulations

Being retired, i have more time than most to prepare recycling.

newspapers and magazines are tied in bundles, cardboard in boxes as far as possible, and cans and plastic bottles in the bags and boxes provided. Aluminium, as advised by our council, is separated and put in a clearly marked bag.

On every collection day, which coincides with landfill day, the aluminium — a supposedly rare commodity — is emptied out to be collected with the general rubbish.

Some local councils say it’s necessary to scrap all the contents of a bin if there’s just one item contaminating it, as they cannot afford to re-sort. What about using some of the hundreds of offenders on community service, whose punishment work is unpaid?

if my efforts, minuscule though they might be, to assist in recycling aren’t good enough, there are several sites close by where the whole lot can go over a hedge.

More definition of exactly what is and what is not recyclable is long overdue. What about Brylcreem tubs, Pot noodle containers, medicinal cream pump containers and many more which are used as an excuse to reject the lot? R. B. HENSHAW, Liskeard, Cornwall.

Malta’s example

The collection of waste by our local councils is becoming a major issue (Mail), but with the proliferation of incomprehensible and often impractical regulations, jobsworth bin collectors, waste bin spies and ever fewer collections, i wonder what’s going on.

For 12 years i lived in Malta, where we had a daily collection. You could set your watch by the arrival of the dust cart. Rubbish was put into small carrier bags with none of it separated, apart from bottles and newspapers, and the service operated six days a week. As the bags were small, the collectors had no problems with heavy bags. Bulky waste was collected on a Saturday by arrangement.

The receiving depots had only one day’s rubbish to process, which they did with remarkable efficiency. They had to: the island is very small and densely populated with no spare land for landfill. The icing on the cake was that there is no such thing as council tax in Malta. if they can do it, why can’t we?

it’s almost impossible to get everyone to comply with council demands. Many will, but a lot won’t bother. instead of finding more ways of punishing offenders, why not do the segregation of rubbish after collection, ( as has been put into operation elsewhere)? Councils would save a fortune on PR propaganda, employing all their bin inspectors, imposing fines and generally alienating the public.

There are machines that will efficiently separate the various elements, thus giving the responsibility for separation to the operator and relieving the public and business of the pressure of trying to conform.

if the machines are not sophisticated enough, then there must be some brain out there who can design one. it would also take many wheelie bins off the streets.

ROY MARTIN, Maidstone, Kent.

Road menace

HAVING recently read about foreign drivers owing millions of pounds in unpaid fines to local councils, these drivers can also cost members of the public money through their irresponsibility when driving.

Three weeks ago, when legally parked on a side road in Leicester, i returned to my car to find the rear offside door and rear quarter panel badly damaged.

Fortunately, or so i thought, a witness had left a note on my windscreen giving the name of the (foreign) lorry, a number and time of the incident together with his telephone number.

When i spoke to this witness, he told me he would be reporting the matter to the police, as the lorry driver hadn’t stopped, and i did likewise. i was told by the police that, despite my giving them the name of the company, they could do nothing.

i subsequently found the address of the Belgian firm on the internet and sent them a letter detailing everything, including what the witness had seen and the time of the collision. i’m sure they could have traced the driver and confirmed the information.

i offered to email photos of the damage, but so far, i’ve had no reply. Was i naive to think they would? Would a British driver escape prosecution if a similar incident occurred abroad?

SIMON MODEN, oadby, Leics.

Happy ending

I’M GLAD people have finally acknowledged Mills & Boon’s romantic fiction books have literary value and are great works of feminism. They’re definitely not antifeminist (Mail).

Many years ago, when feminism was reaching its height in the UK, as a grandson of Charles Boon, one of the firm’s founders, i worked for Mills & Boon and we only occasionally faced accusations by feminists.

More often, it was men who were shocked that their womenfolk were reading romantic — and sometimes sexy — books. You can’t hope to please all the people all the time.

Most of the employees were female, and Mills & Boon maintained the highest standards of spelling, punctuation and grammar, which can’t always be said of other British publishers.

People in india loved the books so much they would hand- stitch the paperbacks to make them last longer. Male submariners requested that 10 per cent of their library books should be Mills & Boon titles. This could never have happened with poorquality stories.

it’s true there’s a huge amount of snobbery about Mills and Boon’s product, but all is not lost: Oxford University Press has great respect for Mills & Boon’s output and has published Passion’s Fortune, a history of Mills & Boon by academic Joe McLeer.

My mother- in- law, a keen Jane Austen fan, used to decry Mills & Boon’s books — until she read one and changed her tune.

HUMPHREY BOON, Hindringham, Norfolk.

Don’t dunk Jaffas

MY GRANDFATHER, Rudolf Schwarz, who was a Swiss chocolatier at Mcvities, invented the Jaffa cake (Mail).

he wasn’t averse to dunking his biscuits, but would never have sunk to dunking his own Jaffa cake. he would be ‘whisking in his grave’ at the very thought! ROSEMARY BRINKLER, Billingshurst, W. Sussex.

Election questions

The question of a councillor, under attack in the Press for allegedly using a false address on his nomination papers, is unlikely to be resolved by a thorough Metropolitan Police investigation. The Met’s record in dealing with voter fraud is embarrassingly bad.

Last year, after a landmark court case, a light was shone on to corruption and voter fraud in Tower hamlets.

The Met, true to form, failed to find anything in the 200-page judgment they felt warranted prosecution.

during their investigation, they did not contact the election petitioners or indeed those of us who provided evidence and witness statements.

in his final judgment, the election Commissioner named some of the more extreme cases of false voting and false registration.

These included one man who, due to a by- election in the borough, contested two elections in two different wards in a period of six weeks, using two different names and two false addresses.

The Metropolitan Police did not think this worthy of investigation, let alone prosecution. Cllr PETER GOLDS, London Borough of Tower Hamlets, London E14.

Give me patients!

HOW ironic that the doctor’s receptionist has changed back into the ‘dragon of the surgery’ (Mail) with 800 of them dispatched for retraining. ironic because they used to be trained, and it was done well.

i spent 16 years at West Kent College, including being tutor to a two-year course for medical secretaries. Reception duties were an integral part of their studies, which included medical shorthand typing, basic

anatomy and physiology, and medical vocabulary, as well as computer use and normal office practice.

I still recall the joy of watching a girl who had never excelled at anything inch herself by sheer enthusiasm and hard work from the bottom of the class to the top.

I also taught a one- year A-level course where the time factor made the schedule even more intensive. On both courses, fieldwork reports from hospitals and general practice were excellent.

students knew that salaries would be less than those of the commercial world but eventually the disparity became extreme.

Combined with the impact of IT, this reduced the number of applicants until it became impossible to continue with medical training.

MARION COLLIN, Tunbridge Wells, Kent.

Wrong medicine

my DAughTer has now passed her doctor’s exams, with merit. her reward is that she can now put B.sc (hons); mA; mBChB after her name and ponder on her massive student loan debts against the reward of a salary which is less than that of the average London secretary.

Once she’s paid her huge rent for shared accommodation in London, travel to her nhs London hospital job and other basic overheads, she has nothing left.

meanwhile, three of her relatively recently qualified doctor friends have given up the struggle here and gone to Australia or new Zealand on far higher wages and to work in better conditions. Others have gone to work in pharmaceutical firms or the City for at least three times an nhs junior doctor’s salary.

mr hunt: these young people are the high achievers who have options. never mind Brexit, you are the architect of Drexit. PETER MASON-APPS, Reading, Berks.

Sam old story ...

whAT’s the point of continually changing the eng- lish soccer manager when all the new man does is continue to select more or less the same failed team?

Alf ramsey’s world Cup success in 1966 was built on a team of players who ‘gelled.’

he had the courage to leave out ‘star’ players like Jimmy greaves and ignored the pressure of the media.

sam Allardyce seems to have taken over in the same vein as other recent managers while supposed ‘stars’ in the national side have simply failed to perform. DOUGLAS J. WATHEN, Salford Priors, Worcs.