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.