All McDonalds outlets are shut down and this is having an obvious impact on street litter. Second only to the mess left by smokers is the trail of bags, ketchup sachets, cups and straws left by the junk-food addicts who buy their fix at the McDonalds branches in Crayford, Eltham or Swanley and decorate the pavements and verges on their way home. Unfortunately, although the Coca Cola factory at Sidcup is shut down, there are still mountainous stocks of the poisonous stuff in the shops and so the bottles and cans are still plentiful on the streets.
Clouds sometimes have silver linings
This is so appropriate to the time we live in and so sad for me at the same time:
I live near a 386 bus stop in Herbert Rd, which means that in term time students of the now Academy 6th Form college on Red Lion Lane, the ex Eaglesfield boys comprehensive school, get out of the bus and pass my house, holding their polystyrene boxes of burgers and chips or other culinary delights from McDonald or other equally healthy food distributors, and their bottles of coke or tins of other diabetes enhancing drinks. The poor kids are so laden with food, and trying to balance their smart phones at the same time that as soon as they can, precisely outside my house and all the way up to the college, they drop every thing they don’t need or can’t hold anymore, on the pavement that’s paper bags, boxes, cans and bottles ( I have found some tucked in my clematis bushes), chicken wings, half chewed are littering the pavement and I have to struggle passed them with my dog who has developed a taste for them, at the risk of her own health and my vet bills.
I used to collect the rubbish in front of my gate but then decided I wasn’t going to become the crazy old lady with nothing better to do than to clean the pavement. I decided to leave everything there, kicking angrily the cans into the gutter if they were in my way.
But then I realised that one of my ex-pupils from Plumstead Manor, someone who was in my tutor group for 5 years, and who also passed my house on her way to work, as a cleaner at the same college, was clearing the mess outside my door. I asked her not to do it, to leave it to the guy who cleans the pavement with his broom and his little cart once a week. In between two pavement cleanings I started taking photos of examples of rubbish and even of students dropping stuff as they walked up the hill and I meant to diarise it and then submit it to the new Principal.
I didn’t get round to doing it but Paula, my ex-pupil and I became friends and she told me how when she left school, after a few unsuccessful jobs, she decided to join her father who was running a small cleaning firm, after that she joined an agency procuring cleaning teams to schools. The job suited her. She belongs to the team of cleaners dealing with the Shooters Hill campus before and the school day, and she told me how the students were never told to pick up rubbish and the common areas, the corridors, the classrooms were littered as she had never seen anywhere else.
She had noticed that things had become very bad since the college became an academy, 3 years ago, and I had made the same observations. When I worked as a Regional Officer for the NUT I was often involved in cases at the college, when I spoke to the headteacher or the then chair of governors, Dave Picton, I sometimes reported things which had nothing to do with my union job but concerned me as a local resident. We mainly got on very well and they even sent me flowers when my husband died. I haven’t had any contact with the new principal although I still intended to.
Paula and I have often joked that I don’t need to look at a calendar to know when the college is on holidays. And then the third week in March, , Wednesday 17 to be precise, when the Covid-19 crisis started to close up on us, Paula came to my house after her school cleaning job in the morning and I told her that I needed to isolate myself because of my great age. She offered help with shopping etc.. and we said goodbye, not knowing how long this would last.
That afternoon Paula called me to say that her husband who had been unwell with bronchial problems had been taken to hospital and put on oxygen and on induced coma. The doctors asked Paula who she had been in contact with that day, part from her work colleagues and she named me. She was asked to contact me immediately and tell me to isolate completely…This was 2 weeks today. I haven’t seen anyone since but I have walked my dog every day on Woolwich Common where I rarely see a soul. In phone calls with Paula, who was also in isolation, I made jokes about the fact that the pavements around me were pristine, in the absence of the 6th form college students… This state of the pavements, the lack of McDonald’s polystyrene boxes were light relief in between reports of Paula’s husband plight and lack of progress again the Corona virus, the breathing problems, the transfer to Kings college hospital in Camberwell, the enhanced breathing support, the dialysis machine, the fact that she could not see him…
Yesterday afternoon Paula called me to say that she had a call from the hospital asking her if she wanted to come before they disconnected the machine . She did and she stayed with her husband until he died. He had just celebrated his 60th birthday, he had been a bus driver.
The nurses told Paula that they were not allowed to give a a test, not even allowed to take her temperature but to go home and isolate herself for another 2 weeks and she doesn’t know how or when she will be able to arrange the funerals.
I have just come out of my 2 isolation weeks when I could have been contaminated and when this is all over I will do something about the disgusting rubbish at the 6th form college, where cleaners had to picked dirty paper hankies that students just dropped on the floor in the same way they drop McDonald boxes and coca cola bottles on their passage and talk to Danny Thorpe, even though the college is no longer run by the London Borough of Greenwich. Sorry the Royal B oG.
I must apologise for any typos etc… I have written this response blind because the box disappeared as soon as I reached my second paragraph. But in the scale of things I guess that it doesn’t matter.