Where there's a willow...

Geese. Water buffalo. Fishing lake. Dexter cattle. Houseboat. Grazing.

In no particular order, all of the above have, at one time or other over the last six years, been suggested as potential "uses" of our acres of wet grassland.

Buffalo and cattle need fencing. Geese need a house and fencing. A lake needs digging and dredging. A houseboat needs a lake, which needs digging and dredging. Grazing needs drainage, which is just digging and dredging in lines rather than one big hole. Ultimately every one of them has the potential to damage the existing eco-system of the grassland. Scrap that, every one of them WILL damage the existing eco-system of the grassland. A damaged eco-system is not good for wildlife, specifically not good for the wildlife that barn owls like to hunt and eat. So ultimately every one of them has the potential to drive away our resident barn owls. And we wouldn't want that!

The upshot of six years of deliberation, procrastination and letting the grassland do its own thing, is that we have decided to let the grassland do its own thing. The difference is that from now on it is going to be a managed do its own thing. To date, doing its own thing appears to have consisted largely of growing willow. So in my untrained and uninformed mind a managed do its own thing would essentially entail managing willow. As luck would have it, Denmark Farm, the conservation centre down the road near Lampeter, had a free willow management course coming up, so I signed David up and sent him off with pen, paper and a packed lunch.

He came back with pretty pictures of pretty things made from willow (leaving me with the need to have a giant woven willow ball in my life). He also came back knowing how to coppice willow. Most important of all, he came back knowing that the willow he had just learned to coppice is completely different to the type of willow growing in our grassland. When is a willow not a willow? When it's the other willow. All was not lost however, for on the course was a man who knew about both willows and, to David's great excitement (we don't get out much these days), this man not only knew what willow we would need for burning in our biomass boiler, he also knew how we could grow it in our grassland. All of which explains why a few weeks later a corner of our grassland looked like this...

Okay, so I realise that black mulch sheeting is no better for the eco-system than a herd of water buffalo, BUT it's only temporary. It also looks a lot bigger in the picture than it is in real life (said the actress to the bishop). When David announced we would be planting 200 willow trees I tried to sound more positive than I felt. The memory of the after effects of using a mattock to dig one hole for one tree lingers still, and it isn't a happy one. Fortunately, when you're talking willow whips, there's a much simpler method. Push them in! BUT in the early weeks and months, the whips don't like competition from weeds and their ilk. Hence the sheet mulch.

David ordered the sheeting before he ordered the willow whips. No surprise then that the sheeting arrived before the willow whips. It was also no surprise that once the sheeting arrived, David just HAD to get it laid down IMMEDIATELY. No waiting for help. No checking the forecast, No checking willow whip estimated delivery date. You have to admire the enthusiasm that led him singly handedly to strim a 400 square metre area of the grassland and then roll out, lay and peg down sheeting of the same dimensions. Such a shame then that the following few days were so very, very windy. Windy enough, in fact, for the sheeting not only to rip out most of those pegs but to then toss aside the breeze blocks and tree trunks hastily put in their place. I envisaged this going one of two ways - either we would wake in total darkness with the front of the house shrouded in black mulch sheeting or the last we would see of it would be a swirling black cloud disappearing over the top of the valley like the giant cloak of a departing, cackling witch. Fortunately, David's diligence shuttling to and fro with wheelbarrow loads of rocks kept it grounded, if a little billowy round the edges. The willow whips which would anchor it properly were delivered a few days later and we were able to plant them straight-away. Well, I say straight-away, but actually there was a short pause between arrival and planting, allowing David to pose as a prone contemplative wizard....

Once that was out of his system and I had stopped giggling, we lugged the bundles of whips down to the grassland (a simple enough sounding task, but fraught with difficulty when I get the heavy end and get the giggles again while traversing tricky terrain). Safely at the location we revealed the whips...

.... and shoved them through slits in the sheeting....

.... all 200 of them ...

.... and then found the planting instructions at the bottom of the packaging. Hey ho, they're not dead yet though, so fingers crossed (and assuming that the willow man knew what he was talking about and wasn't just spinning a yarn, or perhaps weaving a willowy tale) in four year's time we'll be coppicing a year's worth of fuel.

Dear Santa

I have no memory of ever having set foot in a grotto. I don't recall ever sitting on Santa's knee. I have no shortage of both vivid and blurry childhood Christmas memories - browsing mail order catalogues marking items for the wish list (pausing briefly in the homeware section to draw faces on all the dinner plates), placing my wish list under the front door mat for Santa's helpers to collect, watching the Poseidon Adventure on Christmas Eve with Grandma sat next to me preparing a colander full of sprouts, filling the red plastic beaker with milk for Santa's midnight refreshment, genuinely believing my brother and I could open and re-pack our stockings at 4 a.m. without anyone else in the house knowing - but no matter how hard I rummage in the memory bank, meeting Santa himself just isn't in there. I'd like to meet him now. I know his local schedule so it wouldn't be impossible to track him down somewhere between his appearance at his Ceredigion Museum hide-out and his walk through on the Rheidol Railway Santa Special journey up to Devil's Bridge.

After 30 plus years the Mr Frosty slush puppy maker that regularly appeared on my wish list but never in my Christmas sack has been knocked off the top spot. Assuming a 42 year old woman can stalk a bearded old man in a red suit and sit on his knee without being arrested, and assuming also that he believes my claim to have been ever so good this year, I would ask Santa for a handyman. I don't expect my handyman to be one of those manly Diet Coke swigging chaps who are the advertising industry's idea of the ideal handyman (not least because he'd catch a terrible chill being bare chested during a Ceredigion winter), just someone who turns up when he says he will, works without back-chat or complaint and accepts payment in cups of tea and packs of biscuits. I don't even expect my handyman to do everything on my extensive task list, just those chores I dislike the most but either can't leave David to do on his own without feeling guilty or which David won't do because he doesn't consider them necessary but which I need to see done for reasons born of obsessive compulsive tidiness.

Any job related to the reed bed is in the former category, but the winter cutting and clearing of each year's reed growth is right up there in the "most hated" section of the "chores I dislike" list. I have no issue with handling reeds that grow in poo-ey water. Apart from the occasional nose wrinkling whiff as the septic tank liquid flushes through, the reed bed is surprisingly odour free. No, my issue is with the reeds themselves, their itchy scratchy cut ends. Despite the gauntlet gloves, for days afterwards I have to keep my forearms covered to avoid looks of concern and raised eye-brows. Plus it's one of those tedious jobs where you can break into a serious sweat working for hours and yet each time you stand to survey your handiwork there always seems to be more to do than has been done. I should confess that due to illness my contribution to this year's reed cutting was minimal, and that only serves to increase my guilt.

Jobs in the latter category include leaf clearing. And when you have a lot of trees, you also have a lot of leaves. Leaves fluttering in the breeze on trees are pleasing to the eye and ear. Leaves piling up in gutters, on paths and around the bins are a drainage problem, slip hazard and an eye sore respectively. I can only persuade David of the first of these. He accepts that an acidic leaf mulch is required for our blueberry bushes, but I cannot persuade him that the needs of those six bushes are reason enough to rake up, bag and drag every fallen leaf. His punishment for maintaining this patently unreasonable position is to stand at the lower side of the sloping Games Room roof and scrape towards him, into his face, into his eyes, the leaves, twigs and general tree detritus that I gleefully push down the slope towards him. My punishment is spiky beech nut cases down my sleeves. If Santa doesn't put a handyman in my stocking I shall be forced to clear the rest of the leaves on my own!

The bugs are back in town!

There are good bugs and there are bad bugs.

We like good bugs so much we've built a hotel for them. Another masterpiece from the whittler's work bench. No pets allowed, but bugs welcomed! A range of accommodation is available - if you like a round room we can offer smooth walled pipes, hogweed stems for those who prefer rougher spikier decor, or for something more rustic try a log hole, but if your taste runs to modern but functional, try a brick. Booking facilities for this latest accommodation offering will soon be available n our website. Book early to avoid disappointment.

A good night's sleep is guaranteed, but with neighbours of the inquisitive poultry variety there's a high risk of being breakfast the next morning rather than having breakfast.

Meanwhile, in the bad bug camp, the baddest bad bug in the entire bad bug kingdom is back with a vengeance. This menace is invisible at first, lulling you into a false sense of security while its nibbles remain miniscule. You watch, you wait, you take pleasure in seeing your fruit bushes go from flower to budding fruit. All seems well. Then BAM! Overnight each caterpillar-like sawfly larva has grown in size ten-fold, its nibbles now clearly visible munchings on a vast scale, clusters of voracious little beasties devour every single precious leaf on your gooseberry bushes and every scrap of green on your redcurrant bushes.

Three years on the trot we've suffered the injustice of the sawfly larva attack and seen our fruit bushes stripped of all foliage. One year we tried companion planting with flowers said to deter these larvae, but by the time the seeds germinated I'd forgotten they'd been sown at all and suspecting an infestation of previously unidentified weeds, promptly plucked out every single seedling. First failure. Another year we tried replacing the top 2 inches of soil (the winter home of larvae to be) with a layer of fresh mulch, with no visible reduction in subsequent larvae hatchings. Second failure. Daily sprays of Soil Association approved "Bug Clear" didn't appear to clear a single bug. Third failure. And before you ask, no the chickens aren't interested. Fourth failure. Finally, in a last ditch attempt to save our four year old gooseberry plants, we dug them up last winter and relocated them at the other end of the field. How foolish of me to think I could fool the all seeing, all sniffing, sawfly with such a simple trick. Fifth failure. Now its back to the good old fashioned chemical-free but rarely effective pest control technique of spraying with warm soapy water. 

Before...

I'm determined not to be defeated. This is now one woman's fight to save her dreams of gooseberry fool and summer fruit pavlova. Every day I pull on my Marigold gloves, get down on hands and knees, inspect each plant leaf by leaf, and shake, flick and squidge the little b*****s to death. Small ones turn to slime. Big ones pop. Stuff the bad karma, I'm on a mission. I look down from above to find the larvae peeping out from underneath. I rummage in the middle to catch the larvae inching their way up the central stem. I look up from below to spot the larvae silhouetted against the sky. As a parting shot I stomp on the bodies of larvae strewn around the base of each bush just in case anything still has sufficient wriggle power to make it back to the mother ship.

... during ...

... after.

Hour upon hour passes in this way, and I have a "dot to dot" pattern of midge bites up my arms and around my face and neck to show for it, but I fear all is in vain as when I return the next day a million more have hatched and the bushes have become more and more skeletal. So long gooseberry jam, farewell redcurrant jelly.

A whittling he will go!

If I had a pound for every occasion when Dave has offered to whittle, carve or otherwise knock up something for me, I wouldn't be sitting here writing this, I'd be taking a trip in my private helicopter for a week in the sun on my private island. If I had a pound for every item Dave has actually whittled, carved or otherwise knocked up, I could probably scrap together enough to buy a bag of pick 'n' mix. There are signs, however, that I may yet be able to swap sweets for sunshine.

It began with Valentine's Day. I wanted gifts for our Valentine's weekend guests. I'd seen various bric-a-brac, shabby chic, crafty type shops selling slate hearts bearing assorted printed words of love, but wasn't convinced that the workmanship matched the price tag. Ever hopeful, but with little expectation of success, I showed a picture to Dave and enquired as to the likelihood of him knocking up something similar. Well blow me down, if before I could say "don't worry, I was only asking, I can always buy some from that shop in Lampeter", he'd whipped out his Rotozip and was off rummaging amongst his scrap yard off cuts. OK, so the prototype was a slightly wonky, strangely misshapen heart, but armed with a cardboard template there were soon not one but two slate hearts flying off the woodshed workbench production line. I let the side down with some dubious handiwork with brush and paint (which in Dave's opinion did not do justice to the quality of his own workmanship), but all in all I think that between us we did a rather good job for the princely sum of 45 pence for a strip of ribbon.

He didn't stop there. Next up, the tree lamp. We'd been following the fortunes of our friend Sarah on the BBC's Great Interior Design Challenge (which she won by the way, so if vintage, quirky unique interiors are your thing, I recommend you take a peak at her website before she's a rich and famous designer to the stars!). Anyway, shameless plug over, on one episode of Great Interior Design Challenge Sarah created a lamp from a silver birch tree (not the whole tree, obviously). This idea lodged someone deep within Dave's brain, where after a few days of mental whittling, it blossomed into a new project. A redesign of the dining room in Cwt Mochyn cottage has been in the cards for some time, with a new lamp having been on the "to buy" list for months but with no junk shop find or eBay listing having taken my fancy. Dave was now on the case. Dead tree identified, chopped and lopped, stripped and whittled. Handy tree surgeon log cast off re-located to the woodshed, stripped and whittled. Of course, our version of Sarah's tree lamp would have to be "eco". The retro filament bulbs she used look very cool but are about as eco as a hot tub is, so Dave sourced an alternative and needless to say our eco but cool bulbs came at eco but cool prices. It's still neither easy nor cheap to be green.

 

Right now I'm sourcing the wildlife for Dave's tree. I have a felt robin ready to nest in its branches, and one of Sarah's very own blanket birds should be flying this way very soon (well they are made from Welsh blankets so it seems appropriate that one should come home to roost). You'll have to wait for the birds to arrive for the "after" picture and the grand unveiling of the finished article.

As if those two masterpieces weren't enough, before the varnish on his tree lamp was dry, he was plucking willow whips from the grassland, then back in the woodshed, whittling knife at the ready, knocking up a couple of willow hurdles. 

Is there no end to this man's talents? I intend to find out! I will be shamelessly exploiting this sudden burst of creativity. I've already put in my order for reclaimed wood shelving for Cwt Mochyn cottage. Dave may now be the whittling king, but I am the queen of lists, so I'm pretty sure that his enthusiasm will be on the wane long before my "to make" list will be complete.

Philippa’s Project List

So for those of you that know Philippa, she is an exceptionally well organised individual. You could even say she even has a touch of the OCD’s. (I say this without fear of reprisal knowing that her favourite job would be working in a library cataloguing books).Those of you who know me, know that I’m not very organised, and will get round to stuff at some point. Without Philippa’s love of lists however, I’m sure we would drift along here and not get half of the things done that we have. Philippa’s to-do list is an ever morphing creature, which one day can be replicated on the back of a stamp. The next day you would need a ream of that old style dot matrix printer paper that goes on forever. I have learned how to handle this beast recently, and I have come to the decision that if I wait long enough, the list will naturally evolve, with some of the more undesirable jobs disappearing altogether. This technique can only last for so long, and eventually I can identify the jobs that Philippa definitely wants doing from the jobs which were entered following a sudden rush of enthusiasm following reading some article, or seeing someone's comparable business.

One job she has been elbowing me about for over 6 months now is to build a mini jetty at our pond, so guests can do some pond dipping without getting their feet wet. Today was the day when I finally got round to it.

About two months ago I managed to acquire a few lengths of old board walk. The original plan was to build a bridge across the pond, but that scheme died a death immediately as I found that the maximum working wellington boot distance from the bank was 12 inches. So I reverted back to the mini jetty idea

Philippa practicing her forward twist dive with two and a half pike from the 0.5 metre board.

With this job complete however, I am aware that the beast that is rebuilding the clay oven looms ever larger, and I fear that I have no defence from that particular task!

The last major eco project

The final frontier has finally been breached in terms of making Banceithin as sustainable as possible. We have always purchased our electricity from Ecotricity on an 100% green tariff, but we have also always wanted to generate a large proportion of our own energy. The cost of installing a wind turbine or solar panel array was out of our reach and, until we had completed the refurbishments, we didn’t want to risk spending our last bit of capital, but with the majority of work at Banceithin completed I started to look into micro generation again.

The UK government have introduced a tariff scheme for small producers of electricity to encourage more people to install micro generation systems. The tariff pays you a set amount for every kW hour of electricity you generate, which is index linked for 25 years. You also get a dramatically reduced leccy bill, and if you produce more energy than you use, your energy supplier will pay an addition unit rate. All in all it added up to a ‘no brainer’ - with our savings earning under 2% in any bank account, a micro scheme should return between 8-12%. With these facts in hand, we then had to choose which technology would be best suited for us. I always had a romantic notion that a wind turbine would be best for us here in Wales, but on further investigation, the cons quickly outweighed the pros.

Cons:

1. We visited a 4 kW turbine near us during a windy day, and were amazed how noisy it was, a really steady high frequency whirr.
2. Having moving parts, a wind turbine would need more maintenance.
3. Wind turbines, and especially their installation, are more costly than photovoltaic panels.
4. The feed in tariff for wind turbines is less than for solar PV.
5. You need planning permission for wind turbines, and that is a sensitive subject around here…. Solar panels below 4 kW don’t need planning permission in England and Wales.

Pros:

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The main reason not going for solar initially was that we just thought it seemed ridiculous here in Wales, but these modern panels still produce even when it’s cloudy (though admittedly not as much). Maybe it’s something to do with the fact the panels are manufactured in Wales!

So it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that we plumped for the wind turbine…… no no, just joking. We went with a local company, who did our electrical work here on the cottages, for the provision and installation of 22 solar panels with a maximum capacity of 3.96 kW hours. We’ve had them installed on the wood shed which is south facing, and the contractor increased the angle of elevation of the panels from the paltry 6 degrees of the shed roof, to 15 degrees, which increases the performance of the panels, and allows the self cleaning coating to work.

The 22 panels on our wood shed.

The ‘Sunny Boy’ inverter (no really, that's what the manufacturer calls it, not us!) converts the energy created by the panels into usable 240v AC power fed back to the house, with excess being sent back to the national grid. Unfortunately the Sunny Boy has a digital display which tells you how much power you are creating at that moment, and how much you’ve created in that day. This means I am continually ‘popping’ up the shed to check on how much we have generated and reporting back to 'er indoors. I have been very impressed with the performance so far. We have an average daily usage of 14.5 kW hours, and with the panels in for a couple of weeks now, we have been creating anything from 7 kW hours to 25 kW hours. The 7 kW hours was produced on a dreadful rainy day here, but that was still virtually half of our daily usage….though it is August…..

One of the the best bits about the install is that the contractor has installed lights and some power points to the shed. My work bench now is fully lit and will allow tinkering long into the night!

And the winner is …

The omens were not good from the start. First stop on the Green Tourism Awards road trip was the supermarket, to stock up on nutritious road trip snacks to keep us perky for the long journey, you know the kind of thing I mean – cheese puffs, bacon fries, fizzy cola bottles. As I rummaged amongst the cobwebs in my purse I heard the till operator mutter about something being inauspicious. At first I thought she was passing judgement on my snack choice, but then I noticed that my purchases added up to “£6.66”. Yikes! Obviously putting something back was not an option, so I laughed in the face of superstition and strode confidently back to the car, muttering under my breath “this trip is not doomed, we’re gonna win, this trip is not doomed, we’re gonna win…”.

The rest of the day passed without a hitch. I didn’t drop beetroot on my parents carpet at lunch. We didn’t get stuck in a monumental M4 traffic jam. I didn’t spill red wine on my white shirt at dinner. We didn’t have the airbed with a leak. Maybe Lady Luck had stowed herself away under the dog blanket and joined us on our journey to the Big Smoke.

Well if she had, come the next morning she’d upped and left us. Can’t say I blame her. The price of a beer in Pizza Express was nearly enough to send me scuttling back over the border. The bad juju started with an iron, or more specifically, a broken iron. But that was ok because Dave would be able to iron his shirt when we got to our friend’s place in Wimbledon. Oh dear, said friend doesn’t appear to be answering her phone. That’s ok, she’d be home by the time we’d driven across South London. But she wasn’t. Dave failed to make himself understood by her non-English speaking cleaner so off he went in search of the local laundrette. As luck would have it there was one round the corner. This is the laundrette that only closes on Christmas Day and one other day in the year. What are the chances of us turning up on annual steamer servicing day! And so it came to pass that just hours before the awards ceremony was due to start, Dave is stood in his boxer shorts on the pavement of a leafy residential street in Wimbledon changing into suit and crumpled shirt.

Time for a pre-awards ceremony pint to calm the nerves brought on by all this bad juju. What’s that you say? None of the beer pumps are working today? Okay, okay, I get it, I’m reading the signs, we were never supposed to win! 

The Stakeout

I’m discovering that being a Keep Wales Tidy Litter Champion changes how you view the world, or more specifically it changes what you view in the world. A stroll is no longer just a stroll. The eyes flit from hedgerow to river bank, seeing past the tips of emerging daffodils, zoning in on the glint amongst the grasses. Is it a crisp packet? Or maybe a can? A flick of the wrist and quick as a flash the litter picker is in, out and the offending item stowed away in the big blue bag.

It’s just as well that my long suffering Other Half mastered the art of selective listening some time ago as these days every journey, however long or short, involves a mini-lecture on the evils of litter and general bemoaning and bewailing over the ever present roadside detritus. More worrying, for him and other road users, is my habit when driving of watching the verge ahead instead of the road ahead. The litter wagon has plenty of parking related injuries and an encounter with a ditch or, worse still, a tractor could be the end of her.

I’ve also discovered that trying to collect litter on a beach on a very windy day is an exhausting exercise in frustration. The big blue bag becomes a big blue balloon and I end up collecting the same piece of litter several times over as the wind works like a mini tornado whipping each piece up and out of the bag and back onto the beach. Windy day or not, working the high tide mark is never good for the soul – I end up feeling vaguely depressed by the never-ending plastic flotsam and jetsam. Last week I collected nothing but bottle tops, and no bottles. Is there someone further up the coast collecting topless bottles? 

Meanwhile, closer to home, my arch enemy the demon diet Pepsi drinker is alive and well , with a thirst for low calorie carbonated cola that remains undiminished and unquenched. Yesterday, just 11 weeks since my last litter pick down tin can alley, I collected another 50 diet Pepsi cans. That’s a serious daily intake of aspartame and caffeine! By the law of probabilities, if I keep walking up and down the lane I may just accidentally on purpose catch him in the act, indeed I may even get a diet Pepsi can related injury if I get between car, projectile and hedge at just the wrong moment. The possibility of a stakeout has not yet been discounted – I have a tent, a sleeping bag and a gas stove, and if the quantity of evidence sitting in my big blue bag is anything to go by, I wouldn’t have to camp out too long before a “disposal" incident” takes place. But knowing my luck (and propensity to snooze excessively), I’d probably oversleep and get a face full of exhaust fumes and mud as I poke my head out through the tent flaps just in time to see the offender disappearing over the horizon and another empty can bouncing under the nearest bramble thicket.

The Pepsi Challenge

Being a Litter Champion brings out the sleuth in me, my inner Miss Marple. Every trail of litter tells a story. In my mind’s eye I build a picture of the litterbug (or bugs) in question.

Yesterday, the thaw began, so I grabbed my litter picker and with snazzy blue collecting bag swinging off my arm, set off to snatch up litter as it emerges from the melting snow and ice.  By the end of the walk my bag was no longer swinging, it was weighed down and clinking. I returned home and surveyed my stinking booty – 36 cans of Diet Pepsi of various ages, from mint condition through to ripped and rusty, all of which were collected from the same 50 metre stretch of road.

Miss Marple deduced that this was not the result of a single litter dropping incident. It seemed improbable that a coach load of Pepsi addicted Weightwatchers members should pass through the lanes of Bethania. No, this was the work of the lone Diet Pepsi drinker who, judging by the state of the cans, has been driving this way for some time. The discarded cans were all in the same verge, so our litterbug always drinks the can of Pepsi on the same leg of the journey, I’m guessing it’s a pick me up caffeine hit for the early morning journey to work. Given the lack of convenience stores round these parts, I’m also guessing that our litterbug’s shopping list for the weekly supermarket run includes at least one multi-pack of Diet Pepsi. The random assortment of cans left in my bag suggests that in desperate times our bug has had to resort to Diet Coke as a substitute for the preferred brand. What saddens me most about my find is that the only conclusion I can reach is that our litterbug lives locally and cares not a jot about the Welsh countryside. Our bug speeds through the lanes slowly enough to wind down the window and toss out the empty can, but too fast to see the ugliness left behind. 

My fear though is that the bug is more observant than I give him/her credit for, and is perhaps both well aware, and perversely proud, of the trail of glittering aluminium in the hedgerow. In collecting up the cans I have inadvertently laid down the proverbial gauntlet and initiated a Pepsi Challenge with a twist. Can the bug drink Diet Pepsi faster than I can collect the litter? Am I destined to be the owner of the world’s largest empty Diet Pepsi can collection? Just who is the demon Diet Pepsi litter bug? More importantly, has he/she actually lost any weight?

Rubbish!

Litter sucks. It’s unsightly, hazardous to wildlife and bad for puppies who eat anything and everything (and equally bad, if not worse, for owners who have to clear up after puppies who eat anything and everything and consequently end up with a dicky tummy). The litter bugs even find their way to “the middle of nowhere” (to quote our city dwelling friends). We are victims of the drive-by, burger eating litter monster who frequents the MacDonalds in Aberystwyth, spends the 25 minute journey from there to here scoffing his burger and fries (it so has to be a male!), then tosses the packaging out of the car window and into the hedgerow down our lane. Perhaps it’s the same person who drinks McEwans Export and kicks the can into the ditch, where it magically doesn’t disappear but becomes a nutrition free gum slashing snack for the ponies in the field. Teri and I regularly return from our afternoon stroll with a booty of assorted plastic bottles – last week we bagged three 5 litre Morrisons vegetable oil bottles, no doubt discarded by a hard up farmer who’s reluctant to spend his precious pennies on diesel for his decrepid Land Rover.

Where am I going with this mini-rant? Well, as of this week I will be going by the title of Litter Champion. Keep Wales Tidy heard of my one woman crusade and rushed to sign me up to their campaign. Ok, so I’ve bigged myself up a little there. In fact I contacted them, had a coffee with my local Project Officer, signed a bit of paper to say I won’t sue anyone if I accidentally fall in a ditch and break my ankle, and took delivery of my Litter Champion Pack. Here I am modelling the latest fashions that the Litter Champions of Wales will be seen wearing on the streets this season...

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Check out the practical yet stylish all weather poncho in cherry red; the logo emblazoned t-shirt with complimentary litter grabber and blue litter collecting bag guaranteed to mesmerise even the most excitable of puppies; and the highlight of the autumn collection, the one size fits all high-vis gilet, available in fluorescent yellow only.

It’s not all fun, fun, fun for the Litter Champion. I’m accountable for my litter collection performance, keeping monthly records of my hoard and providing photo evidence to prove I do actually pound the streets sporting my poncho and gilet, striking fear into the hearts of the litter bugs of Bethania. I’m watching you!