RUBBISH! A journey along to road towards Hurworth from Darlington on Tuesday was a summer delight, punctuated by bags of rubbish on the wide verges.

As Spectator had just gone to some trouble to leave bags of bric-a-brac where it could usefully by sold for a good cause and thereby recycled, and had bags of garden rubbish languishing in the shed awaiting a trip to the tip, this hit a raw nerve.

This kind of sight is still drearily normal; an excursion in the Kinninvie part of Teesdale recently threw up the usual haul of mattresses.

Why do people go to the trouble of dragging their rubbish into the countryside when there are free collections. Why get out your car and instead of heading for the tip, head for the country?

If you left your last mattress at Kinninvie, does the next one go to Long Newton? Give your rubbish away folks, and give the verges a life.

The sting?

THE young lad who stopped Spectator's colleague on her way to work certainly had a rapidly swelling bee-sting and asked what he should do about it.

Still only a couple of hundred yards from her own front door, it would have been so easy to take him back there and administer the sting relief she knew was in the bathroom cupboard. But this is 2004 and dafter methods have been employed to gain entry to people's homes.

He'd already been turned away from accident and emergency at the nearby hospital, he said. As it seemed unlikely they'd have refused one of the instant topical treatments, that in itself aroused suspicion. She directed him to the shopping centre and its pharmacy.

What an indictment of the modern world, that a sting arouses suspicion of quite another meaning of that word.

The first shot

AS Euro 2004 mania continues to tighten its grip, let me throw my small spanner in the works.

Spectator is not too fussy when it comes to watching football (having followed Darlington for 40-odd years) but the saturation coverage in the media and the obsession with the tournament of many who've never been to Feethams (or the new Arena) in their lives, hides one inescapable fact.

The matches so far have been quite boring. Even, apart from the last three minutes, England v France.