Litter

Litter drives me wild. Anyone who thinks its acceptable to throw their rubbish on the ground must be, to some degree, mentally unbalanced. There's no other explanation.

But as much as your general litterer must not be wired up correctly, those who litter the countryside are a different breed again. I'm not talking about someone who drives down a country lane and throws their McDonalds wrappers out of the window, I'm talking about the person who goes out of his or her way, hiking or biking out into the hills and fields to appreciate the natural beauty, and then simultaneously ruins it by throwing their rubbish on the floor.

The most troubling thing, and the part that really makes me question their mental stability, is the complete lack of logical thought process behind their decision to spoil the landscape:

That bottle of pop, that they were quite happy to carry round with them when it was full and weighed half a kilo, suddenly becomes such an impossible burden now that its empty, weighs next-to-nothing and can be squashed down to a fraction of its original size that the only rational, reasonable option of dealing with it is to throw it on the ground.

There's no way that that crisp packet, that took up a portion of rucksack real-estate on the outward journey, could be transported home now that its empty and can be folded up into something the size of a credit card. No way. It must go on the floor. Or, if they have a pang of conscience, stuffed between the rocks of a dry-stone wall.

I really believed that the countryside might offer some escape from mindless, selfish, brain-dead idiots, but it seems they still manage to find a way through.