My plastic fightback

Admittedly, it had been a trying day and I probably should have buttoned my lip when I saw the person in front of me throw their empty can up into my garden, and drop their plastic wrapping on the footpath. I’m heartily sick of finding discarded bottles and cans in the front garden and having to accommodate them in my recycling bins. So I caught up to the offender and said: ‘‘Excuse me, but did you drop something?’’

He looked at me as if I was demented as I excitedly expostulated how I had just witnessed him hurl his litter into my property.

‘‘OK lady, don’t have a baby,’’ he rapped at me contemptuously.

‘‘Hardly likely,’’ I retorted, shaking my ageing dewlaps at him as I pointed to the plastic that had drifted into the gutter and told him to pick it up.

He sniggered at me and kept on walking as I turned and stomped home, red hot under the collar even though the weather was as cold as a politician and as wet as a sow’s nose.

It wasn’t just the act of dropping litter, it was the casual way he did it that enraged me. The whole world was just one giant piece of toilet paper he could wipe his bottom on, and everyone else in it could go to blazes.

Oh well, he was a callow youth, and a spotty one to boot, and he would, in all likelihood, live to see 2050 when it is predicted that there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.

By that time, perhaps, the animals will have staged their revolution and we humans will have become the livestock. Laid out on giant meat trays in animal supermarkets, our freshly culled corpses will be wrapped tightly in the eco-friendly equivalent of plastic, a fitting end to the failed experiment of humanity.

In the meantime, we should hurry up and stop strangling vegetables and meat in hideous plastic and abolish vacuum packing.

We may be feeling deeply chuffed that we have begun to mend our ways and ditch our convenient shopping habit of plastic bags, but we need to start eschewing goods that are overly packaged. One can hear the supermarket cartels perishing the thought, because this would mean they would have to employ more staff. Quelle horreur!

Instead of swooping up a six-pack of chops or snarlers and hurling it into the trolley, the shopper would have to interact with staff behind glass counters and point to the individual sausage of choice and have it wrapped in paper.

Or perhaps the shopper could hand their own lidded storage container over and get a discount for providing the receptacle.

Sometimes the food you want only comes in bulk packaging, which increases food wastage, so it would follow that individualising food would mean fewer rotten things to chuck out from the fridge.

Shopping this way would take more time, but look at the success of slow cooking. Slow shopping could become fashionable, especially if foodstuffs that continued to come plastic-wrapped carried the warning: ‘‘Plastics can cause male infertility.’’

Keeping the population down is what every responsible male citizen gives lip service to, but no red-blooded male likes to think that his issue is not 100 per cent top-shelf and ready to impregnate at the drop of a trouser.

Meanwhile on my own patch, I’m considering urban guerrilla tactics and laying down rebound nets in the front garden. When that youth throws his next can, it will automatically get chucked right back at him.

I supposed it would be just my luck I’d get done for female assaults male. That’d be right.