Oh yes, I'm the great campaigner

I noted with interest last week that Big Brother is alive and watchful in Newcastle. University students are having their bins monitored to see what recyclable/compostable items they have thrown away. “It’s a bit like having your conscience sat on your shoulder niggling away at you.  And on top of that you know that other people are also judging you,” was the apparently contented opinion of Anja Thieme, one of the research students leading the project, nicknamed BinCamC.  Perhaps the students have never read Orwell's  Nineteen Eighty-Four; perhaps, having grown up in an era of reality TV, they don’t see that the camera may be intrusive and potentially dangerous; perhaps they have decent local recycling facilities; perhaps things have changed since I was a student and they all have cars.

The Big Brother aspect should be generating debate, but for now my subject is cars, or, as usual, the lack of them. For, at least where I live, it is well-nigh impossible to recycle much without a car. We have limited kerbside recycling, we can pay extra for garden recycling and to have bulky items picked up, and the rest - Tetrapaks, cardboard, many plastics, foil, batteries, books, clothes, shoes - must be taken to recycling points. Food waste cannot be recycled, at least not in my road, though small bins of old food are collected in an adjoining road.

 

I can do some of this. Foil is not too bulky, batteries go to a  local shop, I can take clothes, books and shoes to a charity shop from time to time, as long as I don’t want to take too many. But it is hard to carry large loads of cardboard or Tetrapaks on the bus along with anything else I might need to take into town, and the only place I know that recycles plastic fruit containers etc would involve taking two buses, which is quite an effort just to be green about a few pots.

As I am not the only person in the area who does not drive a car, I cannot be the only person with this problem. In fact, about 26% of the population does not drive cars, so I suspect that these people have similar problems, unless of course, their local council has been kind enough to provide decent recycling facilities where they live. They do it in a neighbouring borough, so  WHY NOT WHERE I LIVE?

Rather than moan, I have taken to writing letters to councillors to ask them to remedy the situation. I have also become the great campaigner for a train and bus system that tie up rather than the current system, whereby the bus from the stop by the local train station leave sas the train pulls in. OK, all I have done so far is written a letter, but it is a start. Similarly I have written to complain about the failure of one of Britain’s many rail companies (too many to remember which now, bloomin’ privatisation) to tell us about engineering work when they sent us our travel itinerary for a trip to Birmingham and back a week ago. We wouldn’t have minded so much if the ‘replacement bus service’ had tied up with the connecting train. Instead, we dawdled into Wokingham ten minutes after our train had left, and guess what, the trains run once an hour on a Saturday evening as those who can’t afford/choose not/have other good reasons not to run a car are not expected to venture far on a Saturday evening. Why should they? They fall outside the norm and therefore must be punished.

There seemed little to do on a Saturday evening in Wokingham for a family with three children. In fact we ended up in the Budrum Kebab House by the station, where the food was not great but the friendly service made up for it. And at least we had food, which is more than the commuters had last Thursday when they were stuck for around four hours on trains between Waterloo and Woking. When E, who was on one of the trains (the one with a diabetic passenger in need of insulin, and a woman who was eight months pregnant) finally arrived at our home station there were no buses and too few taxis for the crowds of commuters. He ended up walking the half hour home.

The message - life is not designed for those without cars. I shall have to complain to Big Brother about it.