Life in modern Britain (2)

The newspapers often have reports of people being fined large sums of money for putting all their rubbish in a rubbish-bin to be collected, instead of putting some of it in different open containers so that it can be blown around the street. Aware of this, I have been carefully using the complicated system of open green boxes and purple boxes that we have been told to use in our district. Cardboard, carefully torn up, in one box, newspapers in another, tins in one, plastic bottles in another. Working at my desk, I can then watch the chaps coming to empty the boxes - which they do by cheerfully putting the contents of both purple and green boxes into one big bin and wheeling it away...

Wine bottles, however, are a different matter. They are meant to go in to the purple box. But sometimes people who put them carefully there recognise them again, dumped at the end of the street. Some believe (but this may be "urban myth" ) that if the staff on duty belong to a religion that denounces alcohol, they don't like them into the big bin because that would mean they would be wheeling away bottles that had once contained alcohol. So the wine bottles are left...to join the rotting sofas and the other clutter...