It was a gorgeous sunset last night and the hound and I had a gorgeous walk on the beach, keeping our eyes west towards the sea; studiously ignoring the ever increasing levels of s*** on the tide line. We felt we could do this as we are organising a clean-up in a few weeks time so we have earned the right, in advance, to imagine what the beach will look like after we're done.
The sad news is that the Marine Conservation Society's adopt-a-beach/clean-a-beach organiser's pack arrived and it's a chunky folder of doom, inches thick. There seem to be reams of complex surveying to be done - example: "how many cotton buds/bottles/cans are there on the beach, and please put accurate numbers not just 'lots'?" - sorry but the answer is, in fact, loads. The beach is a mile long and it is literally covered in crap. We don't want to count it, examine it and seek out its provenance, we just want to clear it up.
But worse than the survey is the 'risk assessment' - without a doubt THE single biggest curse of modern Britain. There is no risk. If you are unfortunate enough to somehow injure yourself whilst clearing up a beach then it's your fault. No-one else's and you don't have the right to collect money from anyone. I shall go no further this time, except to say that the whole folder has put us off doing our clean up with the MCS - surely not their fault, but the huge amount of paperwork just made us depressed. We want to clean up the beach not get involved in civil-service double speak and risk assessments. bleaugh. So I was very happy to read this morning that the Local Government Association has banned a huge chunk of spurious language that I hate - blue-sky thinking etc. Sadly it doesn't look like they've banned risk assessments yet. *sigh* http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7948894.stm
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