Why I don’t give a fuck about shit on the floor

I’m not for littering. Let me start by saying that. I have always thought that if there is a bin around then you should always put your litter in it. I mean, why not?

I have to admit though, that I’m not really that against littering either. Maybe it’s because I have always had a disgustingly high mess threshold so when I see rubbish on the streets I’m not really bothered in anyway. When we were in Amsterdam for the Queens birthday and the rubbish was piled higher than our heads I thought it was kinda amazing. Ditto for the aftermath of Reading festival. But I suppose both of those times were different to the norm as all that mess represented good times had, so the more there was the better the time it must have been.

I think my lack of caring about litter really just stems from living in Richmond. This place is fucking clean. So clean that I know that if I drop something on the floor, the likelihood is that tomorrow it won’t be there.

Which is why I had an argument with my friends tonight. We were on Richmond Green and there was a pile of empty beer cans abandoned near us, and I couldn’t see what the big deal was. Someone asked me if the rubbish bothered me. I said no. Because why would it? I know for a fact that regardless of whether or not people litter on the green that Richmond is so …well rich, that tomorrow undoubtedly there will be street cleaners coming by to clean it up. Caring about it is the equivalent of caring about cleaning your room before the cleaner does in a hotel. Why bother? It’s their job, and they are going to do it anyway.

Someone brought up the oh-so-clever point of, “Would you like it if the rubbish was up to here (points to a couple feet off the floor)? Because that is what would happen if everyone littered.” No, no it wouldn’t. I wouldn’t particularly care, as I have previously mentioned I have an incredibly high mess threshold, but more than that, would it really ever get that bad? Can anyone really actually believe that as humans we would ever let it get to the level where we were wading through our own rubbish? No. Certainly we would not. And definitely not in Richmond.

Someone else made the argument that if no one littered then we wouldn’t need so many street cleaners and so wouldn’t have to raise taxes to pay for them. I usually at that point would make the trite point that litterers keeping street cleaners in jobs, but I decided not to tonight, as I am a little older and wiser than last time I had this argument, and I know understand that no matter what happens we are still gonna employ the same amount of street cleaners. And even if we fire some, taxes will not go down as a result.

Can you seriously imagine any politician saying “and a special thanks to everyone for keeping the streets tidy. I’m not going to spend the money we saved on street cleaners on something else, instead I’m going to take it off your tax bills”. No? Because it’s a stupid fucking thing to say.

As I said at the start, I’m not for littering, but in Richmond, I don’t think it matters so much as elsewhere. I know England is filthy, but not this town.