YOUR LETTERS
HAVE YOUR SAY ON RURAL ISSUES
Have your say on rural issues.
Share your views and opinions by writing to us at: Have your say, BBC Countryfile Magazine, 9th Floor, Tower House, Fairfax Street, Bristol BS1 3BN; or email editor@countryfile.com; tweet us @CountryfileMag or via Facebook www.facebook.com/countryfilemagazine *We reserve the right to edit correspondence. Today, I walked the length of Chesil Beach, whereon I did find:
plastic bottles (milk, pharmaceutical, oil, Ribena, shampoo, Lucozade, mineral water, Oasis, Yazoo, bleach, spray cleaning fluid, plus larger ones marked toxic and/or corrosive); shoes (trainers, wellingtons, working boots, flip-flops, Crocs); bread crates; fish crates; mushroom crates; a laundry basket; life preservers; marker buoys (several-hundred-pounds worth if I’m any judge); a fleece-lined jacket; mooring buoys (to cans two metres in size); (beer, oil, soft drinks, industrial lubricant); roll-on deodorant containers; lobster and crab lobster and crab pot pots (mangled) plus markers (with fluorescent nylon flags); an inkjet cartridge; printed circuit boards (parts); a ‘disposable’ spoon; a retractable sports rehydration teat; highlighters; container cigarette with lighters; a hairband; a wallet; boat fenders; glass jars (pickle, jam, coffee, lidless); balls (soccer, tennis, rugby, golf, squeaky dog); nondescript lengths of synthetic rubber; a bowl; scrubbing brushes; ropes (maritime); part of a sundeck lounger; a sunshade pole;a disposable razor; car tyres; an inner tube (still inflated); a foam wreath in the shape of an anchor, wrapped in red ribbon (plastic); a panty liner (but remarkably no tampon applicators, which are common to most beaches); a takeaway coffee cup lid (but no stirrers or drinking straws); plastic bags
(cliché); wooden pallets; bottle tops; light bulbs (eco and incandescent); various lengths of plastic tubing; numerous smooth-edged shards of fibreglass sheeting; Lego; a toy dinosaur; buckets (sandcastle, crab and builders’); aerosols (hairspray, sealant, repellent, deodorant); a cistern ballcock; spent shotgun cartridges; mastic cartridges; fishing net fragments and lengths of coloured twine; umpteen knots of monofilament line; bottles a polystyrene (glass: fishing beer, fishing line; wine, float; fishing vodka, a child’s line gin, spools; Ricard); hat; more a a crabbing couple of hand spent Nespresso capsules (thanks George); a baseball cap (peak only); polystyrene (various lumps thereof); unidentifiable fragments of ‘plastic foam’; fridges (three, rusting); two dinghy keels; a radar (!) at least four feet wide, seemingly from a vessel most yachtsmen would pejoratively call a gin palace, oh, and enough timber to build a shed. If it hadn’t been for the wheatears, the occasional clouded yellow butterfly and the osprey hunting mullet in The Fleet I’d have been right dispirited. Brian Edge, Dorset Editor Fergus Collins replies: That list makes hugely depressing reading and I include it this month as it also gives me a chance to talk about BBC
Countryfile Magazine and plastic. Many subscribers have complained to me about the magazine arriving through the post in a polythene wrap. While this material is recyclable in supermarkets, it is not picked up in doorstep recycling collections. Therefore, we are working with our parent company, Immediate Media, to search for a viable alternative, which the company will roll out across its entire portfolio of magazines. The key is to find a product with a low carbon footprint that also protects the magazine in the post and does not add significantly to the cost. As soon as I have some good news on this, I will share it in my editor’s letter on page three.