A letter to the Council on waste (form of address: electronic mail)

Dear Ms A.,

Thank you for your email.

We lost another bin this morning. Amid the hail of rain and what, for a minute, looked like snow; amid the blast of tooting horns from private vehicles, another of our treasured containers has fallen.

It's been especially difficult recently.

What with the dire predictions of impending climate catastrophe and the increasing mountains of refuse disposed at the roadside in the latest scourge.

People don't seem to care anymore; or at least they're too ignorant to understand. They walk along the streets heads down, looks of defeat and desperation strewn across their faces, resigned to the inevitable, it would seem.

Yet still the rubbish cometh. As if amid bleak suggestions of alien invasion or attack by another countrydom, we aren't hell-bent on our own self-destruction by refusing to see the plain obvious.

I ask you: Is there anything more important than the planet we depend on? Do people not realise this, or have we all been clouded in ignorance and blinded by our own pretensions to superiority, not yet emerging from the blur?

I know this sh*t of a man called Brexit. He always rejects my recycling advances and I keep becoming distracted by him.

Still I fear it is all too late. What do you think? For the common man or woman, the Council, anyone. The rubbish will keep coming, drowning us in the stink of our own effluent. Yet we continue to bluster and brag and sing and shout as if it's all able to be remedied at the flick of a switch.

I like to end on a positive. Because after all that's what makes us human, isn't it? So here goes. At least there'll be plenty of CCTV footage to watch in our remaining moments... For lack of human moments, I fear this is probably our only hope of distraction. Before the inevitable prospect of crushing extinction I mean.

Thank you for your attention to this most serious of matters. If I do not hear back, I won't hold it against you. I myself frequently refrain from too much social interaction these days, a result of ever-creeping nervous breakdown.

I wish you the best in your journey, for now adieu.

BR