Some good news on the topic of human diet

Hurrah! Well done America!

(Just so you know, there's an ad in the middle of this video. It's indicated by an orange bar moving across the bottom to show its progress. It's a benign ad for a good product — just letting you know because it's kind of grown-in to Dr Cywes talking)

Here's the new graphic showing the working principles, which are somewhat provisional and will be finessed with time.

It'll be interesting to see how this unfolds, not least because in the UK the EATLancet recommendations have gone with the ideologically driven "Green" agenda currently in vogue, with its reliance on grain and seed oils (good luck with that), to create the "Planetary Health" diet, as shown in this graphic —

— and detailed here:

In past years I'd have been all on board with the "Planetary Heath" diet, but as a result of taking that direction (as well as being very naive about the ubiquitous rollout of novel pharmaceuticals) I got an overload of oxalate and SIBO, and it's taken me a very long time and a great deal of money to figure out how to unpick the results. 

If this is a topic of interest for you, Max German has offered a careful analysis and response here:

Please, please note — the thing in that second video about vegans being deported is Max German's joke, not something the US govt is recommending!!

Moments

The Welsh baritone Cai Thomas is (I think) eighteen years old now. He has the most beautiful voice. Here he is, just this last Christmas, singing O Holy Night. A voice so sure and true. I love it.

But listening to it made me think about about the way life passes, and the memories we hold in our hearts, of times that will never return. The chances we have that belong to particular circumstances and relationships and occasions. 

The Japanese have a wonderful term for this — ichi go ichi e — which means pretty much "one encounter one chance" expressing the fleeting nature of the moments life offers us.

There's a glorious speech in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar that goes like this: 

There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat;

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

Those words carry the same haunting sense of a moment which, once gone, will never come again. Ichi go ichi e. Yes, there will be other moments of course — life is full of moments — but there are times that take your breath away, that are part of the reason you came to this earth to experience the human condition with all its terrors and uncertainties, moments that you know you will treasure for ever, all the more precious because they will never ever come again. Times that, whether in public life or just personally in your own heart, make you what you are; crossroads moments. It can be about a decision or an insight or a choice — or it can simply be a moment of sheer beauty and joy, and you are different for having experienced it.

What made me think of these moments, these bright jewels of life that are fleetingly ours then gone for ever, is this video of Cai Thomas six years ago, before he matured from a treble to a baritone. Here he is singing the Laudate Dominum from Mozart's Vespers.

Cai Thomas now, today, has the most beautiful voice; but I'm so glad that memory of him singing as a twelve-year-old boy was captured and recorded — that time which was ours for a while and will never come again.

Rondo

Our Alice plays the French horn. Probably the most famous horn piece of all time is this one by Mozart.

In consequence, at fêtes and concerts all through the summer, Alice is called upon to play it.

The only drawback is that it's fiendishly difficult.

She realised early that she had no choice; if she wanted to play French horn in a performance band, then playing that Rondo was non-negotiable — mandatory.

The neighbours at Beaufort Road (where we lived with Alice and Hebe) are remarkably patient and understanding. Alice used to practice in the attic room, which gets very hot in summer and cold in winter. Because all the gigs were in the summer — well, the ones with the Rondo were; it's all Good King Wenceslas and Hark the herald in the winter concerts — this meant Alice playing that piece on repeat for hours with the windows wide open until she got it absolutely right. Because it's essentially a solo, so for a concert it had to be error-free.

And she did get it right, and personally I never got tired of hearing it, and our neighbours (God bless them) never once complained.

But every time I heard it, and I do mean every time, what I was listening to in my mental interior was this rendition by Flanders and Swann.

Labels

I hate labels. All of them. Worst of all are the ones they sew in the collars of shirts, fiendish for irritating the back of your neck.

I hate the stickers they put on fruits in the supermarket. I don't buy fruit but my husband does, and he doesn't mind labels. So I go through the apples and bananas he's set out in his fruit basket on the supper table, carefully peeling off the wretched stickers.

I hate the Fire Resistant labels they affix to furniture, incomprehensibly sited to dangle down from the centre front of the chair so they're clearly visible. You have to keep them, of course, because if you ever want to pass on the item of furniture at a later point, the charity shops can't take it without its fire label. So I either re-attach it where it can't be seen (underneath, where it should have been stapled on in the first place) or I squirrel it away in a drawer to retrieve later if needed.

I understand why manufacturers need to attach labels like this.

But I cut them off.

Other members of my family share my dislike. At Christmas-time, Alice and Hebe had bought some very pretty double-gauze napkins for the lunch table. But they all had the mandatory labels, so when it was time to eat lunch Hebe passed round the scissors so we could get rid of the labels first. Ha!

A book I ordered recently came in yesterday's post. 

I've had this book before, but moved it on at some point, and I wanted to have it again, so I sent for a second-hand copy that didn't cost much. When it arrived I discovered a new and loathsome label manifestation. It was an ex-library book, so to protect it they'd covered it in crackly cellophane, and added a cataloguing label. Understandable but  . . . no.

Fortunately, being librarians and respecting books, they'd stuck the cellophane to an inner paper cover, ingeniously added under the book's own dust cover. This meant I was able to wrestle off the cellophane completely with its cataloguing label, and the book was left intact.

It does have inner labels of course — but if there's one thing even worse than a label it's a disfigured surface where a label used to be; so I left well alone. 

I can live with those inner labels because I don't have to look at them; I can just shut the book.

That blanket, by the way, that still has a label (shown above) — that's an example of the fly tipping where I live. It was thrown out in the street. I left it there a few days in case someone had left it there by accident and actually wanted it; but no, it just stayed there covered in mud and sodden with rain. So I brought it home and washed it, and when my husband sits up late reading, he wraps it round his legs these cold winter nights. I think I will make a nice picnic/sunbathing rug when the summer comes, too, because it's quite thick, not flimsy at all. So it's a new acquisition which is how come it still has its label.

Correspondence cards. Monastic shopping.

Monastery shops aren't always what first comes to mind for online purchasing, but it's worth thinking of them if you are looking for candles or soap or correspondence cards. 

Buckfast Abbey in Devon has an excellent on-the-premises shop stocking wonderful products from monasteries all over Europe, but maybe you aren't anywhere near Devon. They have an online shop too, but with very limited stock.

Prinknash Abbey shop is fab (here), and they sell their lovely incense, but I think it's another one where you have to actually go there. For people not in the UK, "Prinknash" is one of those weird English words that isn't said how it's written. You say it more like "Prinnitch".

I used to buy the most wonderful bathroom things — soap, shampoo etc — from the Abbazia di Praglia, all made in European abbeys and convents; but sadly they stopped shipping to the UK after Brexit. Understandable but sad.

I have bought two or three things — gorgeous ceramics — as gifts from the St Elisabeth Convent at Minsk, a most life-affirming and holy foundation. They ship worldwide.

Something I always like to have in stock at home is correspondence cards. I have a stash from St Hughs Parkminster (where my Carthusian friends are), but of course their own cards aren't the ideal choice if I actually need to write to them, which I do at the moment because I think they've tightened up their internet discipline as the procurator seems to have gone into radio silence. 

The online shops of monasteries mostly sell things they make themselves, and the products can be a little more idiosyncratic than I had in mind, or super-religious which isn't always what I want.

Searching around online to see who was selling what, I came across the shop of the Carmelites at Quidenham in Norfolk, and they make really lovely cards at startlingly low prices. The normal-sized ones are a pound and the little prayer cards are only 35p. They sell handicraft things they've made, plus soaps and balms as well — here. Shipping costs are modest and despatch is prompt. The cards themselves are very high quality. Here are the ones I bought:

If you are in America or Australia, of course you'll have alternative sources of your own. Let us know in the comments if there's any you especially recommend.

Carthusians and oxalate

 What I really want to talk to you about is oxalate, because it's much on my mind at the moment. I had never grasped how much toxicity is wrapped up in what we have been encouraged to see as health foods, and I had no idea that it would store up in one's tissues all over the place and then burst forth — "Surprise!" — like the Spanish Inquisition, causing an astounding array of symptoms entirely bewildering to doctors and involving PAIN — like that, bright red and in bold and in capitals.

But.

There are so many circumstances in life that have a concomitant 'but', don't you find? This is one. Experience has taught me that just as our well-bred aunts and grandmothers knew never to discuss politics or religion (and obviously not sex) in polite society, so one of the modern taboo subjects is health.

I guarantee you this. Try it. If you ask a friend (any friend, pick any one you like) what they eat, a strangely steely look will enter their eye — we call it defensiveness — and they will respond (sweetly, calmly, courteously), "Oh, we have a very healthy diet." And then you know you must stop. Don't say another word. Even if you know more about oxalate than you ever knew there was to know. Even if you are in Susan Owens' Facebook group and you've read Sally Norton's book from cover to cover (even the index); just shut up about it. Say nothing. They don't want to know.

So all I will say to you is that after four years of the most exhausting and debilitating pain, I think (oh God, I hope so) I know how to fix it now. That's all. I don't want to stir up any kind of hornet's nest. I can blog about it if you like, but only if you truly want to know.

Moving on.

I woke up this morning to a lovely long email from Krista, full of all sorts of memories and thoughts and family snippets; an absolute delight. I'll write back to you Krista, of course, but there was one bit I thought might be of interest to several people. 

Krista said: "You have expressed that [the Carthusians] have a life devoted to prayer.  I am curious when they started and if for a specific purpose?"

Oh my goodness, the Carthusians! I'll try not to go on for too long.

They were started by St Bruno of Cologne at the end of the 11th century. There is so much to say about him that I think I'd better redirect you to a potted history.

If you plough through that article you can read all about him — an accomplished and considerable man — and then you eventually come to the bit where he backed out of being made a bishop and went off with some friends to become hermits instead. The bishop of Grenoble (in France), Hugh de Châteauneuf (that translates as Hugh of Newcastle which doesn't sound quite so posh, does it?) set them up in a place called Chartreuse in the French Alps — and that was how the Carthusian order began. If you look at the word you can see how "Carthusian" is extrapolated from "Chartreuse", and that's why each Carthusian monastery, wherever situated, is also a Chartreuse, or 'Charterhouse'.

So the Carthusians are hermits, but with the difference that they are hermit who live in community. That's why their monasteries are so massive — each of the monks or nuns lives alone in his/her own hermitage, but all built together. Here's the one in West Sussex. 

Their life is enclosed and contemplative, dedicated to prayer.  

I'm going to digress for a moment to wonder if whoever wrote the Disney film Encanto knew about St Bruno, because this encounter . . . well, he went off to be a hermit, didn't he? There are similarities. He's called Bruno. 

So St Bruno started off the Carthusian order, and their Rule of life has remained unchanged from the 11th century to the present day, which is quite something.

You have heard of the liqueur called Chartreuse, yes? Well, the Carthusians make it. On the one occasion I went to visit them (they aren't meant to have visitors but they graciously let me go and meet them), they plied me with Chartreuse. I was going to refuse it because I don't drink, but I realised that not only would that be extremely rude because it's their special product but also if I said no then they probably wouldn't be able to have a glass either. I accepted on these grounds and in consequence was too drunk to get the best out of the meeting, but such is life.

There were nine Carthusian houses in England before the Reformation — Witham Charterhouse in Somerset was the first, founded at the end of 1178, as part of Henry II's penance for the murder of Thomas Becket. Then Hinton Priory was founded in 1222 in Gloucestershire (but moved to Hinton in Somerset five years later), then Beauvale Priory was founded in Nottinghamshire in 1343, then the London Charterhouse was founded in 1371 on a burial ground for the great plague (!)

Hull Charterhouse came next in 1377 in the East Riding of Yorkshire, followed by the Coventry Charterhouse in 1381 and Axholme Charterhouse near Epworth in Lincolnshire in 1397. The last of the 14th century foundations was Mount Grace Priory in North Yorkshire, founded in 1398. And the very last of them was Sheen Priory (otherwise known as Richmond Priory) in 1414 in Surrey.

And then came Henry VIII and his reformation. The Carthusians, gentle, quiet men, men of prayer, steadfast and true, would not renounce their Catholic faith. You can read about their martyrdom here. It makes my head reel. This is what the Church of England is founded on. God bless Margaret Clement who did what she could to help them.

One of the Carthusian martyrs, Blessed William Exmew, was the procurator of the London Charterhouse, executed at Tyburn on June 15th of 1535. He was one of the first members of Christ's College Cambridge founded by Margaret Beaufort (who married Owen Tudor). He wrote his name in the frontispiece of a copy of The Cloud of Unknowing that he copied out for his monastery. They have that treasured script safe at the Charterhouse in West Sussex.

So they were men of the utmost courage.

After Henry VIII had finished his grisly work, there were no Charterhouses left in England. But they came back, founding St Hughs at Parkminster in West Sussex in 1873.

And there they live in faithfulness, praying for us and for all our fallen world, day by day. 

I am so grateful that they are there, walking with us quietly, out of sight, holding us up in prayer. We certainly need it.

To get a flavour of their life, I most highly recommend to you Philip Groening's wonderful film Into Great Silence. You have to buy or rent it (and your money would not be wasted, it's the best film I've ever seen) but there's a trailer here.

Snow and silence

 In the winter of 1962 it snowed a lot. I was five years old, and we lived near the bottom of a steep hill.

This was our road.

Right at the bottom, tucked in the corner, was our house — the middle one in this picture. It was a new build, and we moved there from north London when I was three.

In the house next door (to the left in the photo) lived an elderly couple called Freddie and Dorothy Paine. They will have been promoted to a mansion in Heaven long ago.

They had a marvellous car like this one, that we children were occasionally allowed to sit in. I don't know if they still have it in Heaven, but it would fit right in.

You can't see how steep the hill is from the photo that shows our road — but you can tell from this photo of the road that ran adjacent to it, which was called Bells Hill.

Our garden (front — tiny — and back) continued the precipitous downhill descent. My father had to cut steps into it to get down to the garden gate at the bottom. Here are the steps I used to go down when I set out for school in the mornings.

My mother used to stand at the foot of our garden and tell me when it was safe to cross the road, and she'd be there waiting for the same purpose when I returned home at the end of the school day.

Several of the other houses included little children in their household. 

That winter when it snowed so much, at the end of 1962, the children in our road all came out of their houses to play in the snow. We made snowballs and ran about enjoying it, and then we had the idea to make a snowman. We started at the very top of the hill, at the start of our road, and we rolled it all the way down to the bottom, stopping outside our house on the pavement hidden underneath all the snow. The rolling snowman's body increased in size as he rolled down the hill, and once we had made a head for him and set it on top of his huge body, that snowman was taller than I was. 

In those days we all had coke boilers to run our central heating (morning was always heralded by the sound of my father riddling the boiler), and coal fires in the little fireplaces. Ours looked very like this.

So when the snowman's head and body were all complete, one of the children tied their scarf round his neck and one of them ran for pieces of coal to make his eyes, and one of them begged a carrot from their mother to make his nose, and so he was gloriously finished. We were immensely proud of him. 

I tried for the first time ever, eating snow. I can still remember its coldness and purity and the texture of it.

My father travelled the world, and spent a lot of time in Scandinavia at that point in his life, so on our mantelpiece we had a Swedish dala horse like this — 

— and I had a warm Norwegian cardigan similar to this —

— and Norwegian mittens like these to keep my hands warm.

But even so my hands got very, very cold playing out in all that snow.

When the snowman was finished and admired, and my mittens were soaking wet and I'd been eating the snow, I came inside to warm up again. My mother had the fire alight, and she made me some hot orange squash (I had never had it hot before), and we said how marvellous was the snowman very visible from our front window because it was a bay window and the garden sloped up steeply and there stood the snowman at the top.

So I think that exciting day with all the children playing must have been far from quiet — children calling out and laughing, shouting instructions to each other as the snowman was rolled down the hill. Quite noisy, I should think.

But then I remember another time when it snowed, forty-eight years later in 2010, by which time I lived here in Hastings.

Sometimes, because a ridge of hills wraps all round Hastings, it snows here but nowhere else, or everywhere else but not here.

But that year it snowed across the whole of England. They had a photo of it at NASA.

My friend Pearl Thornton was still alive then, and I remember her talking about that snow. She delighted in it, she responded so deeply to its beauty and purity; but the thing she loved best was — she said — it covered all the clamour of humanity just for a little while in a blanket of utter silence. 

Pearl loved the hush of fallen snow.

She is gone now (she died at the end of 2018), but she, too, was lovely. On New Year's Eve every year she used to stay up until midnight, then step outside, then put through her front door her picture of beloved Jesus, so that he would have the first footing into her home as the year turned.

This picture.

Rest in peace, Pearl. Thank you for your eagerness and your joy, for your gift of healing and your loving-kindness. Thank you for loving the silence of the snow.

Snow

 There are two poems about snow that I love. One I'm entirely sure you know already — Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. 

The other you may not have come across; Ben Jonson's poem about Charis. That one isn't about snow strictly speaking, it just has a couplet that crops up within the general effusing about the endless charms of Charis. Where he says:  

Ha' you mark'd but the fall o' the snow

Before the soil hath smutch'd it?

I draw it to your attention not only because it is so very evocative — surely every one of us must have marvelled at freshly fallen snow before somebody took the chance to trudge across it in winter boots with the kitchen compost bin — but also because it has that excellent word 'smutch'.

More than once I've had occasion to incorporate that word into fictional prose, only to have an editor argue with me, insisting that there is no such word in the English language. But then being able to say, "Oh, but there is. Ben Jonson put it in a poem in the 16th century" gets you a free pass to include it in any story you like, because every editor knows they should have read Ben Jonson. Pleasing.

And this morning, here on the Sussex coast, snow was falling in soft light flakes before daybreak. I know this is not big news to anyone living in Minnesota and it's not as startling as if it snowed in Dubai, but here in the very south of England we hold our breath every year wondering if it will snow this time. Because some years it does, but most years we have only frost and not all that much of that.

Our Hebe and Alice absolutely love snow. They are the only people I know who don't mind me banging on their door at six o'clock in the morning in the middle of winter just to make them get up and see the snow. I didn't do that today, but as dawn broke we were excitedly messaging each other photos of our respective gardens.

Their cat Miguel had been out frolicking about in it, and came in to gaze on the beauty from the warmth of the sitting room.

And here, a mile down the hill, we had the most glorious sunrise.

And all this — thinking about the endless flowering of beauty across the face of the earth, so matter how grim and dreary the news might be — reminds me of another dearly loved poem (I'm sure you know this one too) by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

 

 

Finding a moment of inspiration for the year ahead.

Today — New Year's Day — has been happy. In the morning I walked up the hill to our Rosie's place for what has become a tradition for the women in our family. Together we watch the BBC broadcast of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra's traditional New Year's Day concert at the Musikverein's Golden Hall. This year Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducted — joyously and well — and as always, it was brilliant.

This is accompanied by Rosie's wonderful hospitality; she makes us a delicious brunch, and we finish with a New Year toast from champagne glasses (but with what you might call children's champagne because our tases have been shaped by Methodism).

We had such a lovely time together, and it's always a little sad to go our separate ways at the end of the morning.

This afternoon I was writing letters, and then I had poached eggs for tea, and while I was eating them I watched this video from the St Elisabeth Convent in Minsk.

Oh, I love and admire these women, so much! Their output on YouTube is an inspiration and a refuge.

I think my favourite of all their videos is this one, about Sr Iohanna.

The St Elisabeth of their convent is the Grand Duchess Romanov, one of the new martyrs of the Orthodox Church, and as it happens our priest here in St Leonards has a particular devotion to her. So one way and another she hovers near, I think.

And now the video has finished and my plate and mug need washing up, and then I must take the letter I've written along to road to the post box. It's dusk but not yet dark, and our road runs west to the letter box, so sunset is a good time to go.

I hope your first day of 2026 was also a happy one, and that you saw people you loved and found things online to lift up your spirit.

Waving to you from England's south coast. May you be well, may you be blessed, may you be happy, may you be free.

Dog muck and murder

Hollington where I live was once a country village. You can still discern traces of the old ways that shaped it. Two minutes walk from our house (which is part of a large 1930s housing development) the road curves round to the right at the foot of the hill, and you can walk  along the path alongside the Hollington Stream. 

Leaving the main road from St Leonards for Battle (called, unsurprisingly, the Battle Road), and coming down to the same place by the stream, runs a narrow little street, the first section of Hollington Old Lane. It's flanked with small Victorian artisan dwellings, the family homes of the Victorian poor who would have provided the daily labour supporting the households in the fine and elegant grand houses that have become dilapidated multi-occupancy places in the present day. 

Coming off Battle Road down the steep slope of Hollington Old Lane, on your right you pass the Tivoli Forge (that's it in the photo above, on the right, and you can see the mock Tudor houses of our road in the distance). It still is a working forge! That is such a treasure. As you travel through the towns and villages of England, everywhere you go you can see houses bearing the name The Old Forge. That's because nothing happened without blacksmiths in the days before the arrival of motor cars. Even in my 1960s childhood, every afternoon at the close of the school day, there'd be a knot of children gathered at the door of the forge on the way home, watching the blacksmith shoe a horse. I remember it so well, the sight and the smell, the horse patiently standing while the smith changed a shoe.

Then if you turn left at the bottom of that part of Hollington Old Lane to walk along the stream, you pass a row of three small Victorian terraced cottages (row houses, US) that until the 1990s had long front gardens, now parcelled into yards and parking spaces. It used to be such a pretty place and it's ugly now. Walking on past these houses, there's a larger (but still not big) Victorian house, a white house with a substantial chimney, standing alone in a garden that stops where the Hollington Stream comes splashing and gurgling out of the brick conduit built to channel the water by the wonderful Victorians. You can see that house from my bedroom window.

I learned only this last week from an old man who gives his time in retirement volunteering for Tidy Up St Leonards (one of the teams of good people who — all unpaid — go through this sprawling town gathering up the rubbish people drop heedlessly onto the street) that the white house by the stream used to be the laundry; the water of the stream is so clean and pure that it was used for washing clothes in the Victorian era (and doubtless before), and going on into the days when that old man was a boy.

The Hollington Stream bed is the foot of this valley, and I am so blessed to have it and its adjacent footpath running right along just behind our house. On one side of the footpath rises a hillside with four 1960s tower blocks scheduled for demolition to make way for low-rise apartment blocks, but the path passes through little stands of trees and all along it at the foot of the valley flows the clear and beautiful stream, with old oaks and other trees growing on the banks, the remnant of this stretch of Sussex woodland that continues if you follow the stream along.

The tower blocks on the hillside rising up from the stream are surrounded by greensward, so as you can imagine it's a very popular place for people to walk their dogs. Often when I go for an evening stroll along the stream I get into conversation with dog-walkers exercising their pets.

And then there's this.

At the ends of the footpaths are bins put there by the council for rubbish, always faithfully collected, and you are allowed to deposit dog muck in them. So dog-owners buy rolls of bags for the purpose, and gather up their dogs' droppings into bags, tying up the top. 

Some of them carry their bags along to the bin at the end of the path and drop them in; others can't be bothered, and either lob the bag of shit over the brambles into the clear and pure waters of the Hollington Stream, or else hang the bag on the trees and shrubs growing along the banks of the stream, to be someone else's problem.

The particular bag in the photo I unhooked and carried to the bin provided. 

I have often wondered about the mentality of those people who do that with dog muck. It puzzles me. Imagine going to all the trouble of acquiring and feeding and caring for and exercising a dog, fencing in the garden, paying for vaccinations and vet check-ups, buying a collar and lead, going out in all weathers for morning and evening walks, making sure the sofa has a blanket on to keep it clean from a muddy dog (and the same in the car), remembering to get dog meat and biscuits at the grocery store, getting treats and toys for the dog, buying rolls of bags and faithfully gathering up the droppings . . . and then you can't be bothered to carry the bag as far as the end of the path to the bin (and there are bins at all the places the paths end). What? Why?

Not only do some people leave their dog's shit festooning the trees, but there are others who can't be bothered to take their household rubbish to the tip. They think it's a great idea to carry it down the footpath and toss it onto the banks of the clear, pure Hollington Stream.

Sometimes people go to the supermarket and, instead of leaving their shopping cart at the exit, decide it's a great idea to bring it all the way home. And then there it is being a nuisance. So instead of taking it back to the store, they take it instead down to the stream, and throw it in.

And maybe at the end of the summer, the kiddies have trashed their play house. What to do with it? Well, maybe pull off the cover and throw that out in the bin for weekly garbage collection. And the frame? Well one could dismantle it and put that in the bin too. Or why not just . . . throw it in the stream?

As I looked at these items, and considered this recurring problem, mulling over it, I remained baffled. It takes more effort to carry a Wendy House frame to the stream and throw it in than it does to pull it apart and put it in the bin you have right here in your own yard, provided by the council for the purpose, not less. You have to be quite strong and determined to get a supermarket trolley down the grassy hillside and pick it up and throw it over the railings of the bridge into the stream. And the bags of rubbish? So you went to all the trouble of gathering it up in bags, carefully tying them up, and then took four bags of rubbish from your car (which you could just as easily have driven to the dump a mile along the road) and struggled them (along with the wood from your broken fence panels) all the way down the steps and down the footpath, past the council bin alongside the footpath, to throw onto the banks of the stream.

I don't understand it. It makes no sense to me. And I realised, I find it easier to understand why people commit murder than I understand why they do this.