Six people meet for a picnic on Richmond Green. They eat Popeyes chicken nuggets, Sainsbury’s sausage rolls, M&S sandwiches, Cadbury Mini Rolls and Walkers crisps. They drink a bottle of Pinot Grigio and several cans of Sol lager. How do I know? I’m no detective but they’ve made it easy for me. After they’ve finished, they’ve simply got up and left the bottles, wrappers, packages and paper plates on the grass, laid out like a meal on the Marie Celeste. There’s always been litter – Bill Bryson described it as ‘a long continuum of anti-social behaviour’ – but this is something different. It feels more like social anarchy, a total blankness. I can’t get my head around it. People come to Richmond Green because it’s beautiful, a historic site that was once used for jousting. But they just abandon their rubbish when they leave? There are at least 20 dustbins around the green, for heaven’s sake.
It may seem strange to complain about litter as the entire planet moves towards conflagration, but I’m with Voltaire: ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin.’ Candide was, of course, written against the backdrop of the Seven Years’ War which involved nine countries and killed about a million people. At the end of the day (or days), we have to look after each other, but common decency seems in short supply. On 31 January, at 10.30 a.m. – a time known as broad daylight – two masked men smashed their way into a jewellery shop just one minute away from Richmond Green. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube, filmed by someone who might have better employed their mobile to call the police. Nobody did anything, and in truth I doubt if I’d have risked life and limb to get involved. What’s striking, though, is that the robbers knew they could get away with it. No Raffles-style plotting… just turn up with a plastic bag and two sledgehammers. Would this have happened, say, ten years ago?
It’s probably no coincidence and certainly bad timing that the borough’s last police front counter closed at the end of last month. If you want to talk to a policeman, you have to go to Hammersmith or Kingston, six miles away. To be fair to the police, they did track down the perpetrators of the last jewellery robbery in Richmond (May 2024), but this was only after the suicide of poor Oliver White, just 27, who had worked there. It’s a common complaint that we live in a society where law enforcement seems to be completely invisible, but this is clearly having an effect. Blank-faced cameras trap us if we do 23mph in a 20mph zone, but there are few police to be seen. In our local shops chocolate bars have to be locked up in plastic boxes, and nobody has made the correlation between the huge rise in shoplifting (530,000 reported cases last year, up 20 per cent) and the disappearance of shop staff, replaced by more, extremely annoying, machines.
At the same time, we are bludgeoned by signs and audio requests – known as ‘Tannoy spam’ – that tell us how to behave, particularly when we travel. Don’t smoke, stand on the right, let passengers off first, don’t run in the rain, don’t swear at our staff. It’s as if the more we’re shouted at, the more chance we’ll remember something we didn’t learn as children. Is there a passenger in the country who doesn’t dread being told ‘See it, say it, sorted’? When I worked as an advertising copywriter back in the day, we were fearful of what was called the Inverted-U effect. It was an idea suggested by one Herbert E. Krugman: if you show an advert too many times, you put people off buying the product.
This may be one of the reasons for Sir Keir Starmer’s extraordinary unpopularity, along with the U-turns – 16 and counting. And the tax rises. And the free football tickets. He has a habit, particularly during PMQs, of repeating the same mantra over and over again, perhaps in the hope that if he keeps going, we’ll finally believe it. Inflation down, borrowing down, interest rates down. Even if everything was going marvellously, we’d get bored of hearing it. What was it his father did again? Sir Keir has managed to turn his own parent into the ultimate bad dad joke. Personally, I find PMQs unbearable. The Q may be for questions but we never get anything that comes close to an A. So what’s the point?
As for Tannoy spam, perhaps we can, at least secretly, admire the Greeks. I was shooting Marble Hall Murders in Corfu for the BBC last year and did in fact spot a suspicious large black rucksack on its own in the departure lounge at the airport. So I did report it. I spoke to a heavily moustached policeman who strolled over and consulted with a second policeman. The pair went for a coffee and an hour later, the bag was still there. See it, say it, ignore it. So very Greek.
Comments