Are we all barking mad?

I'd say we are. Truly.

My town's annual cleanup day was today. A couple of miles of coast and both sides of the main road and a few side roads.

The turn out was great. About 30 of us from a town of about 150+. Those who were gone away for the weekend cleaned up stretches of the road during the past week. The town is fortunate in that the people who care, really care.

But you guys! The garbage collected! We lost count. Picture above is of about 30% of what we collected. We figured close to 100 bags, 3 truckloads to the dump.

I myself collected 3 full bags.

About 90% of it plastic: Tubs, bags, bottles, floats, fishing net pieces, wrappers.

Surely it's about time we stopped using plastic? And only used recyclable or cloth grocery bags (I do) and drank water from the tap (I do)and filled our own bottles (I do) if we insist on walking around like big babies with a bottle to our lips all the time. (Gee, our ancestors worked hard in the fields or on the water or in mines and didn't suck off bottles all day long, think about it.)

We need serious anti-disposable plastic laws in place. I'm writing an article for next weekend's paper on this.

I live on an island.

We are drowning in plastic. I can't bear thinking about the birds, fish and animals who choke on this stuff every day from the plastic we don't even see.

Stop it already.

Stuff I Miss

About once a week I have a hearty breakfast: sausage, perogies, eggs, toast. I peruse the paper at leisure, soak in the weekend's activities listings, reviews, etc. Part of the ritual of this breakfast is HP Sauce - a first cousin to YR Sauce (anyone remember that?)

This morning, I was holding the bottle of HP Sauce in my hand and felt saddened that something so redolent of my childhood could be so substantially changed, and by a plastic squeeze bottle. It was sacrilegious, this squirting onto my plate rather than feeling the heft of the glass bottle in my hand and thumping its bottom, always in such a way that the amount seemed to be just the right size when it finally plopped onto the plate.

It tasted differently then too, better, sharper. Glass is obviously more hospitable than plastic. The same applies to pop/soda/minerals. Glass all the way. The cans and the plastic alter the taste. I recently had a bottle, a real glass bottle, of Coke. And I was startled when it put me in mind of the Coke bottling plant in Cork where on race days (there was nearly always a race on the Straight Road in Cork) we would get a bottle (or maybe 2?) of Coke for a shilling directly from vendors outside the plant. And here it was - the taste was exactly the same, over 50 years later.

Something has been lost (or gained) in packing foodstuffs in plastic and tin, losing flavour and gaining an overriding plastication in all our basic condiments.

And I haven't even talked about Hellmann's Mayo, have I?

Don't get me started.

And totally symptomatic of our sad old world isn't it?