Richard Baum

A number of questions have arisen this weekend, the answers to which I am currently not in possession of:

1) How can anyone consider the activity of “sphereing” to be anything other than a modern day version of what should have been done to sheep-rustlers in Medieval times? It was horrific. Tamsin may have enjoyed the sensation of rolling helplessly over and over down a Staffordshire field inside a rubber ball, but I did not. If David Cameron had a go, I could well see it forming part of his strategy for deterring youth crime.

And to be honest, it might work.

2) What is point of ice-skating? Seriously. What is its purpose? Whilst I flail about like a one-legged drunkard tight-rope walking across Niagara Falls in a gale, children of 9 fly past me at 75mph in a perfectly controlled glide. Ice should be found in freezers and Arctic nations alone.

3) Why is the recycling facility at Tesco Prestwich so small and frustrating to use? I went there today to get rid of my paper and card (and as someone who receives meeting notes from two separate local authorities, and who lives with a primary school teacher, let me tell you that an unholy aomunt of it ends up in the recycling), and was thwarted.

Normally, attempting to recycle paper at Prestwich is a bit like a fat man climbing a hill. It takes longer, and is much harder, than it should - but ultimately it gets done, and at the end of it there is more of a feeling of satisfaction than there otherwise might be.

The bins are normally full almost to bursting, and attempting to access them requires slalom-like skills to dodge the various discarded boxes and bits of rubbish littering the place. But, as I say, normally I succeed. Slipping a few sheets of paper in here and there, finding a bin with contents that are hearteningly easy to flatten… These are the little things that lead to the big things happening. And I go home with an empty paper box and a happy heart.

Today I encountered a scene that looked like a passing papier-mache cargo plane had jettisoned its load overhead. Rather than being close to bursting, I can only assume that several of the bins had actually exploded, spewing their contents over a wide radius. There was not a single spare millimetre of recycling space. Every bin had reams and reams of damp paper on top. And the floor around the bins was an unsightly mess full of smeared pictures of Princess Diana from the front of the Daily Express.

I find the state of the facility appalling. The Council should be making it easy and pleasant to recycle paper. They are currently making it hard and unpleasant. There needs to be more bins, and they need to be emptied more frequently. And the money needs to be found to pay for it because recycling is not only hugely important in its own right, but is the simplest and first step for most people in leading more environmentally responsible lives. If the Council can’t even get the baby-steps right, how can we convince people to take the bigger ones? And of course, the less we recycle, the more we get fined. If I didn’t have the time and energy to fiddle with wet bins for twenty minutes today, I’d have given up and gone home. I imagine plenty of people did.

Once again I say to the Council - let’s get the basics right. Sort it out. I have emailed the Executive Director of Environmental Services today, to get his view. If it isn’t satisfactory, I will contact the Cabinet Member. Bury Lib Dems are the only party taking recycling seriously in this Borough. We got a blue bin for every house. And now I’m going to make sure that the recycling facilities that the community has are easy to use.

Rick