sounding like a bore.

Life Some of you may remember that I live on the edge of Sefton Park in Liverpool which means that I enjoy the best of both worlds, city living and wide open spaces.

Despite being in a flat, I’m still able to joke about having a garden, even if that garden is about ten acres. We pay host to all kinds of events; last week the Africa Oye festival filled the atmosphere, we enjoy food festivals and circuses and we’re soon to give the In The Night Garden tour somewhere to plonk their igloo.

As a municipal park, it also offers a haven to passing trade, a perfect sun trap for everyone else in the area and beyond. It’s what it’s there for.

What I hadn’t realised is the lack of respect many of these people have for the place.

Walking across the parade field area this lunchtime I found myself stepping onto the cumulative remains of an hour in the sun here, an evening out there. The ground is strewn with cigarette butts and beer cans, coat-hangers and plastic forks.

There are small oblong areas of charred grass where a barbecue has been, and indeed in some places, the actual disposable barbecue, presumably too hot to handle, which will take weeks to grow back if at all. Bits of paper. There are bins, and the bins fill up quickly, especially in hot weather.

At the risk of sounding like a bore, none of these visitors have thought to simply bag their detritus and take it home even though they often have cars with boots, the spaces that brought the mayhem in the first place.

The attitude is that it’s someone else’s problem, presumably the council’s, little understanding the process required to pick the litter from an acre or two, the man hours that they’re paying for, assuming they think at all.

Most of them probably aren't aware that park also recently been through an expensive renovation project which included the repair of the fields.

I was always brought up to put my litter in the bin, even now carrying empty bottles around in my bag for hours, perhaps even all the way home. Even if they were too, they seem to have forgotten.

It’s the heat making me ratty, I suppose, but I simply can’t understand the mentality.

I was asked up front the other day why I’ve become so cynical and amongst the panoply of reasons, this kind of tiny ignorance must be in there somewhere.

I know this sounds like the kind of letter sent to the Daily Mail or column written for them "professionally", of the kind I’d usually laugh at, that include phrases like "I simply can’t understand the mentality".

I also know that almost all of these litterers will be nice people.

I’m just asking for them to be just a little bit nicerer, just so that when I do want to go to the park myself to read a book, I’m able to find a patch of grass to stretch out without staining my trousers with charcoal.