Recent news that the Welsh mountain rescue team had to delay its training exercise so it could clear up the remains of a large barbeque is shameful… but well done to the team for not ignoring the rubbish and instead, all mucking in to deal with it! Sadly I feel we’re going to start seeing more ‘positive’ news like this, since a growing number of folk appear to have lost respect for the countryside. The: “There aren’t any surveillance cameras or litter wardens so let’s just leave it to rot down,” type of thinking… When I said the problems were of our own creation I wasn’t talking about rubbish but about the adults who raised such selfish, lazy characters and who – like their offspring - should be ashamed of themselves!

Veolia’s post-London Pride clear-up. Brilliant that the team was able to gather up 14.7 tonnes of recycling, but the fact that those involved had to first collect 26 tonnes of litter isn’t exactly great news, is it? I realise that when places are so tightly packed you’re unlikely to be able to find a bin and that if you do, it will likely be overflowing, and that if you have a place at the front you’ll not want to lose it by going off in search of a bin, but when did it become OK to just discard rubbish where you’re standing/walking, for someone else to step in/on, stumble over or slide in? I just don’t get it… 

I realise I’m sounding grumbly today but I’m still without access to my Virgin Media email account more than three weeks since the initial outage and the stress is taking its toll. As the issue was ‘escalated’ on Monday evening, I was engaging with a representative via Facebook (Virgin’s instruction) yesterday morning… progress in itself. I thought I was doing rather well working through the cache-clearing instructions when I was thrown from Facebook. I was unable to log back into that or other regular sites without my passwords. Do you, when signing up to anything online, reckon that your password choice will be easy to remember for that particular website? Yes – me too. And weren’t we, years ago, instructed not to write them down for security reasons? Most organisations offer the option of a texted code or emailed link for resetting, but not all do and I’ve learnt that this is a shortcoming. Also, none of Facebook’s texts arrived. Worth checking that everything’s foolproof if you rely on online sales or require regular website visitors to register, perhaps?