Walking the clean streets of Ringmer

I look around the house for inspiration, ideally in the form of chocolate. There’s none to be found, just an enormous ball of purple tinfoil and an Easter egg-shaped piece of extruded plastic. Perhaps I should get out for a while. I’m motivated by last month's Viva Lewes interview with walk-inspired writer Iain Sinclair. He calls it psychogeography. Go for a walk, say what you see. Channelling a combination of Diogenes and Roy Walker – cultural references for everyone – I tie my bootlaces and stride onto the streets of Ringmer.

The topic for this month's magazine is on my mind. 'Keeping it clean'. I spot one of those red bins for dog waste. Have I ever seen anyone emptying one of them? I don’t think so. Can’t imagine that’s anyone’s dream job. Also keeping the village clean are Ringmer’s litter-picking volunteers. I’ve never seen them, either. When I was younger, comic books showed park-keepers using a spike on a stick to stab errant pieces of paper, usually with an amusing aside that involved puncturing bicycle tyres and footballs. Ah, the good old days, when chasing children with a spiky stick was perfectly acceptable.

Further down the road sits a row of recycling bins in the car park; the newspaper container is taped off like a crime zone. Aylesford Newsprint went into administration in February. Is it my fault for not recycling enough? Should I have claimed more free newspapers from Waitrose? A quick internet search on my phone tells me the company’s local MP blamed cheap Russian imports. I imagine old copies of Pravda being smuggled across the Kent coast.

Past the shops, where a plaque for ‘best kept village in all Sussex 1985’ is fixed to the wall. Thirty years on and we’re still looking pretty good, I think. Over the road and past the church. Cleanliness is next to godliness, so John Wesley preached. He had a very short dictionary. I keep walking onto a quiet country road, speckled with litter on the verge. An empty cigarette packet. A crisp packet. A flattened drink can. A broken car wheel trim. A half-deflated party balloon in the hedge, perhaps escaped from a car window. Curiously, all vaguely silver. Maybe I should bring a bin bag for my next walk? I already carry a reusable supermarket bag. Who recycles the bags, anyway?

There’s a hint of manure in the air as I turn to head home. Farmyard recycling, I imagine. A better solution than having a big red bin in the corner of your field. Past the water treatment works and more unsavoury recycling before I arrive home.

Harry the cat is asleep in the back yard, next to a recently-deceased rat. A clean kill. I go indoors, put my hand in an old carrier bag to pick up the rat, then drop it in the dustbin. It’s dirty work but someone’s got to do it.

First published in Viva Lewes magazine issue 104 May 2015.