I have a doppleganger

Her name is Ursula and she wrote to say that she collects litter, and that she lives in a small village on the other side of the world. U says she picks up paper and other garbage at the crack of dawn. Why so early, I asked? Well, otherwise people confuse her with some kind of official garbage collector, and they start to bring her litter and other rubbish to take away. Now that gets my goat. I'm thinking how I would react if folks started to bring me litter at the BlogTrain station. Maybe I should just take it with good grace, after all it is helping with the clean-up. So Ursula walks the lanes in the early morning when noone is up and picks up the mess that has been left behind on the previous day. Apparently the council don't do litter pick-up at all.

U said that this week there was an inordinate volume of plastic bottles and cans beside the village common, an area of rough land where farmers let their sheep graze. She found an electronic gadget that she described to me. I looked it up on the internet and it turns out it's a cyclometer, measures mileage on a bike, and is worth about thirty dollars. I've got it now. A group of cyclists stopped for refreshments, chucked away their empty bottles. The cyclometer fell off one of the bikes. Sounds like justice to me, for all the littering. Of course I'm jumping to conclusions about the culprits again.

Ursula rang the Lost and Found number and they said if noone claims it in four weeks, its hers. She's quite excited and has ideas about getting a bike.

All this is making me feel better. Last weekend was such a mess around our neighbourhood. I was getting seriously discouraged. But somehow knowing someone else cares, over the other side of the globe, makes me want to go out there and pick up litter again in this corner of the planet.