Every Day I Have the Greens

Occasionally as I am cycling the half mile or so from home to the renovated building that is my place of work, I stop to admire a heron fishing in the Wandle. When I get to the office, I auction recovered property online using 100% recycled electrons.

My carbon footprint is smaller than yours and I hate waste, but I hate bullying and bullies more.

Self appointed guardians of our communal environmental conscience were bullying a tiny, inoffensive cleaner who was just doing her job after the AbbeyFest blues on Friday night. I was there and saw it and called them on it and I don't think that they should get away with it. They should feel ashamed of themselves and they should apologise, but the chances of anyone so self righteous admitting that they could ever be in the wrong are vanishingly small.

These activists think that more of the litter that people leave behind at the free AbbeyFest should be recycled. Fair enough, it is a reasonable point, but do they address it by turning up, providing recycling facilites and contributing to the event? Do they my arse.

What they do is photograph, prod, nag and intimidate a lady who is around 60 inches tall and (gallantry notwithstanding) probably a similar number of years old, in an attempt to establish that the rubbish she is collecting won't be recycled, and to keep on keeping on until she is so upset that she feels that she has to complain to me, the only person in sight that she knows.

This is because they don't want to help, but imagine that they are creating some kind of news story about profligacy in SW19 as if in their pathetic fantasy lives they are somehow sticking it to the man in 1967 Haight-Ashbury.

They are self important, self indulgent, kill joy twerps. During the course of my intervention I called the hatchet-faced ringleader a coward, a bully and a sanctimonious bint.

In the cold light of day I take nothing back. Much of the rubbish to be collected was - as you can imagine - leaflets pressed into unwilling hands by these putative saviours of our environment.