13. Diggers and Dreamers

There is an element of guilt involved in litter-picking. We dig out the past:  pick pre-war glass bottles out of the sides of the drainage ditches; erase the scenes of past car and motorcycle accidents - the gnarled metal, glass, and plastic buried in the base of hedges; take away new evidence of what fast foods people are eating and things they are drinking today, as they motor and cycle past and throw out of the window; or the bits that fall off of tractors and trailers as they roll down the road.  We are removing the lost broken treasures and the discarded consumables of people passing through. Cotter pins, wine cans, tobacco tins, mattock heads. We are destroying the bonanza for archaeolgists and detectorists of the future.