Do
you live on Britain's most unkempt street? If so, name and shame it by
sending us pictures
Video:
Bill Bryson on the blight on Britain's streets
“Just so you know,” says the man from the Campaign to Protect Rural England,
“your photographer asked if Bill would pose inside a litter bin, and Bill
said no.” Poor Bill Bryson, I think, the world's gentlest, funniest writer,
an unjudgmental man who sees interesting things in the everyday, has
suddenly found himself in the crass world of photo opportunities. I am just
as bad. My idea is that the new president of the CPRE, which today launches
a campaign against litter and fly-tipping called Stop The Drop, should walk
around Green Park in Central London confronting litter louts. Bill, the man
from the CPRE assures me, won't do that either.
In the world of newspapers, from where Bryson hails, there are sub-editors who
stay in the office, reporters who leave it and star writers who itch to rule
the world. With The Lost Continent, his 1989 account of a journey across
America, Bryson moved from the first category - he once subbed on The Times
- to the second. With Notes from a Small Island, his book about Britain a
dozen years ago, we claimed the boy from Des Moines, Iowa, as our own
national treasure. It is the third step, towards stardom, at which he
falters. He just shows no interest in stardom, no lust for power.
What he is interested in is picking up rubbish and, armed with a
litter-grabber provided by me and pursued by Richard the photographer and
Ariadne the video-multitasker from Times Online, off he goes.
Despite this paparazzi escort, his diligent litter-grabbing prompts no
attention from the park's picnickers and snoggers. Perhaps his ruddy,
bearded face misleads them into thinking that he has been sweeping up after
them for years. Within ten minutes, his green sack is half full. As he pours
the cache into the bin that he wouldn't be caught dead standing in, his face
betrays serious satisfaction. This is a man who not only inveighs against
other folk's detritus, and who will shortly begin writing a column for this
paper about it, but who actually enjoys picking it up.
My first thought is obsessive-compulsive disorder. “Well, it has become a bit
of an obsession; I'm trying not to allow it to become too serious,” he says.
“One reason I wanted to do these columns for The Times is that they will
make me be a little bit more light-hearted about it.”
After decades of yo-yoing between the States and Britain, he settled in
Norfolk in 2003. A few weeks ago, he says, he went on a village litter-pick
and collected a “huge” amount. But as he was being driven to the station
this morning, he saw rubbish once more accumulating. “So when I get home I
will go out and do it again.” What, tonight? “No, no, when I get home next
week. Only because it just needs doing. Once you've done something like
that, you begin to feel proprietorial about it. Even if it's not your own
road. I mean, every time I come to this part of Green Park, I will now feel
a sort of ownership.”
This means the obsession will only get worse? “It's going to get absolutely
worse and worse. It is slightly a problem because it's like with anything:
you can tip over and spend your whole life seeing nothing but litter. I was
just out walking on the South Downs and you have to remind yourself from
time to time to stop looking for litter. Just look at the scenery and enjoy
it.”
To be clear, our new columnist does not suffer from obsessive-compulsive
disorder, although he admits to writing in a tidyish office and to
harbouring an instinct to improve things. “Looking out now on Green Park,
it's just lovely, almost unimprovable. But if I did sit here for a while I
probably would think: ‘They could actually do with another couple of trees
there.'”
For the rest of us, a good starting point would be “first do no harm”,
although it pains Bryson to record that a few months ago he himself did
harm. He was off to Belgium with his family on Eurostar and the security
people at St Pancras would not let him take his coffee through. Since St
Pancras does not do bins, he placed the paper cup on a shelf. Neatly. “I had
no choice but to litter and I think we are all pushed into that position
from time to time.”
Mainline railway stations are notorious, I say, ever since they decided their
contribution to the War on Terror would be to take away our rubbish bins. So
now we litter and excuse ourselves that it is the job of the man with the
big mop on permanent patrol. The answer, he says, is to supply what other
stations have: transparent plastic bins. “My conviction is that bins have
been taken away from places, like lay-bys in particular, where there is no
terrorist danger. It's been done as a convenience to the local authorities
who persuade themselves that somehow this will encourage people to take
their litter home with them. Demonstrably, that's not true.”
So about this CPRE campaign. Take action, it says: lobby your local authority.
Get involved: join Litter Action's “online community”. Get informed: sign-up
for Bryson's e-bulletins. All very good, and all very un-Bill Bryson, an
ironist not an activist if I've ever met one. “Part of me,” he admits, “is a
grumpy old man, but a part of me thinks that being a grumpy old man is
pathetic and ridiculous, so I suppose I vacillate between those two poles.”
The not very grumpy, not very old man (he's 56) got mixed up with the CPRE
almost accidentally. He was on a reading tour a few years ago and people
asked, as they tend to, why he eventually plumped to live in Britain. The
real answer is that in 1973 he married one of us, a psychiatric nurse called
Cynthia Billen (yes, I know) and this is just the consummation of their love
affair. But the next questions always asked were what he liked best about
Britain and then, inevitably, what he liked least. To that, he would always
say litter and that would win him applause. He suggested that people e-mail
him their support. By the tour's end, 1,000 had done so. He wrote to the
CPRE, suggesting that would make a good mailing list for any campaign that
it might care to run. It had a better idea: that he should run them.
“It was a sort of quid pro quo, that they would get behind the campaign in a
big way if I became president. So I went away and thought about it.” The
CPRE, he says, and I paraphrase, is really two organisations. It is its
London office, filled by dedicated, cerebral policy wonks, and it is its
local memberships with agendas of their own: the Essex lot oppose the
expansion of Stansted; in Hants they want the Western Weald to be included
in the South Downs Park.
“It is a strange experience for me. It's not something that I'm naturally
drawn to. I'm not good at it. I mean, I'm really not good at it. My whole
life for quite a long time has been totally solitary, so I'm not used to
working with people. And although I really enjoy the collaborative side of
things, I also just kind of think if you have an idea that something needs
to be done, everybody should see immediately that's the way to go. The whole
idea of trying to build consensuses and things like that is just totally
alien to me.”
In the privacy of their studies, all writers are dictators, littering white
space with their words. Out in the real world, they can be as shy as
Wombles. As the CPRE's head, he is needing to get better at confront-ation.
He is having, for instance, a little run-in with the National Trust. It
concerns Dovedale in the Peak District, which he discovered awash with
litter.
“I had an exchange of letters in which I encouraged them to put litter bins
there and they refused to do it. They feel that litter bins attract more
litter, and they feel that, by not having litter bins there, they are
encouraging people to take litter away from them. My argument is that, by
not having litter bins there, they are encouraging people to drop litter.
And I do genuinely feel that the impression that bodies such as the National
Trust give, in a situation like that, is that they are completely
indifferent to litter. There's no notice saying: ‘Please don't litter.' They
say that a litter bin would be an intrusion, that it would spoil the bucolic
scene. But they don't seem to feel the same way about donation boxes. So I
think it's a difference of philosophy there, but I have to say that my
experience with the National Trust in that respect is very disappointing.”
On his walk along the South Downs Way, he found another National Trust car
park without a bin. He will write again. “And again it will get me nowhere.”
He does not wish to be negative, but he believes that every landowner has a
respons-ibility to help people to dispose of their litter responsibly and
that the NT is slightly in a state of denial.
Even more impressively for an introvert, Bryson recently confronted a litter
lout. A young man had thrown the remains of his fish and chips into a
doorway near Victoria station. “I was right behind him and I just stopped
him and said: ‘Son,' (it always seems to me better to say ‘son') ‘you know,
you live in a really beautiful country; you ought to love it.' As I said
this to him, I thought: ‘He's going to deck me,' but, in fact, he turned
round, he looked at me, very slowly, and he said (he had a very heavy
Scottish accent): ‘You're absolutely right. I'm sorry. I'm just very, very
drunk.' And he went back and picked it up and took it. He was obviously a
good kid. I was lucky to get away with it. There have been other cases when
I've seen people do stuff and I haven't said anything to them because they
do it in such a conspicuous way that they're making a statement and it's not
worth getting knifed or punched in the face.”
So he is not supporting vigilantism? “No, no, no. But at the same time I think
we're getting increas-ingly into a position where people are afraid to speak
out about anything, and, you know, I think you should.” It must be hard for
a non-confrontational soul such as him? “There's not one bit of this that I
want to do. I mean, I'd rather just be home in my garden or writing a book:
A Walk on the South Downs Way.” He is actually writing one now on the
history of household objects: on why, for instance, we all have salt and
pepper on our kitchen tables. He had promised Cynthia that he would stay in
more.
“But this is just something I decided I had to do. This is the one campaign
that I'll become involved with in my life and I'll give it my best shot and
try to make a difference, but it's not a change of character for me. I'm not
now going to be an activist for the rest of my life.”
Although some of us, to this small island's shame, have told him to push off
back to America if he does not like our litter, it may well take a Yank to
bring us to our senses. He may be naive in some respects. Imposing, as he
has suggested, VAT on takeaway meals would surely lose more votes than would
be won by any initative to use the extra revenue to clean streets. And I
enjoyed his plan to devise a chewing gum that dissolves in the rain (but
not, presumably, in the mouth). But being American takes the class sting out
of what might look like a middle-class, middle-England campaign. Near his
place in London, he says, there is yuppie litter. “Yakult yoghurt pots,” he
says darkly. “Not just the working man's crap.”
If I take nothing more away from our encounter - apart from my litter, of
course - it is the thought that picking up other people's rubbish would make
a good hobby for many of us. It gets you out into the fresh air, the
equipment is cheap and the feeling of accomplishment, once done, total.
Also, as is not the case with trains or birds, we will never, I fear, run
out of things to collect.
