A continent composed almost entirely of plastic

IN AN old photograph album I have a picture of myself as a small boy, surrounded by my first collection of toys. There’s a Noah’s ark complete with a whole zoo of animals, a teddy bear, a doll and a toy car. What makes the picture so special for me is that all the toys in the photo were made for me by my parents.

It was wartime and almost all factories had been converted to producing arms and ammunition. Toys came very far down the world’s list of essentials.

Looking closely at the picture I can see the Noah’s ark had once been a wooden box. It had a pitched roof added and windows cut out of the sides, and wheels.

The photograph is in black and white, but I seem to remember bright colours.

The animals were plywood cut-outs, also vividly painted, and mounted on chunky blocks.

The teddy bear I remember well. It was made of woolly lamb skin and stuffed with straw. It’s name was Winston. I also had a knitted doll called Toodles. I think my grandmother made it. She was a great knitter.

Toys, when they once again became available in shops, were made of wood (remember Tinker Toys?) or metal (Meccano sets and Dinky toys). We hadn’t heard of plastic. That came much later. The interesting thing about wooden or metal toys is that they were biodegradable long before biodegradability became fashionable. If you left a piece of Tinker Toy in the garden and then went off to boarding school, it rotted away and became just another part of the planet.

The same with a Meccano piece or metal car. They rusted slowly and eventually ended up as just a slightly redder part of the earth.

The weeds probably benefited from the ferrous oxide supplement. Winston and Toodles became nest building materials for sparrows and Noah and his zoo became compost.

Compare this with today’s plastic toys mass produced by the billion and indestructible. Like all plastic items, once they are no longer loved they are discarded and eventually find their way into the oceans to join millions of tons of shopping bags, yoghurt containers, used nappies, broken plastic furniture, car dashboards and cheap sandals.

I believe there is a vast, heaving continent in the middle of the Atlantic, almost as big as the whole of Europe (before Brexit) and composed almost entirely of plastic. As the great ocean currents swirl slowly anti-clockwise they add tons of plastic annually to this ever-growing continent. Nothing lives there, plenty of creatures die there. The plastic slowly swallows our planet.

Winston and Toodles, we should erect monuments to your kind.

Last Laugh

It was snowing and the mother looked out of the kitchen window to see her two little boys playing in the snow. After a while she called the older one in and said: “Jimmy, remember what I told you about sharing your toys with you little brother. Billy must also get a turn to use the toboggan.”

“Oh, he does, Mom,” said Jimmy. “He uses it going up the hill and I get to use it coming down.”