THERE’S apparently a bit of a problem with people leaving black bin bags full of rubbish in parts of Eastcott and Old Town.

The bags go uncollected because they’re not the regulation blue ones, and their contents inevitably end up strewn about.

I can’t imagine why this is happening; after all, there’s absolutely no reason why the current system shouldn’t work perfectly.

Every household subject to the blue bag system gets a generous allocation of 104 bags a year, or enough for two a week. Once you’ve filled a bag, all you have to do is put it out in some quiet corner of your front or back garden, ready to be carried to the pavement at the front of your home come collection day.

Of course, when you put it in that quiet corner of the garden, you might as well sound a little dinner gong.

While you’re at it, you might also attach a little sign saying: “For the attention of every roaming cat and dog, every urban fox who fancies a change from plundering the skips at the back of supermarkets, every crow, every rook, every jackdaw and every badger who happens to have taken a wrong turning on the way back to its den.

“Welcome to our free buffet. There’s not much by way of food here, as we’ve done everything we can to compost anything compostable so as to cram as much rubbish in this bag as we can because we’re running out.

“Nevertheless, we daresay there are a few tasty morsels here and there and you mustn’t hesitate to tear open the bag in search of them.

“Be sure to strew as much garbage as possible all over the garden, and drag some out on to the nearest pavement so everybody can enjoy the sight and the smell.”

Should we not wish this to happen, we have a number of options.

We might, for example, keep the bulging bag of refuse in our home for as long as we can stand the stink. Alternatively, we might go to our nearest garden centre – assuming we are able – and purchase a large container.

An ideal container is a bin similar to the ones everybody used to have back in the olden days, when a street strewn with garbage was a rare thing indeed.

The third option is to double or triple bag the rubbish so as to prevent any enticing aromas from reaching the noses of passing creatures.

Indeed, official council advice states: “Always double bag leftover meat to deter foxes and cats.”

Unfortunately, any household adopting this tactic will soon find that their stock of blue bags is rapidly depleted, and they may find themselves obliged to wait weeks for the next lot of blue bags to be issued.

If they’re unable to scrounge some from friends and neighbours, they may not simply ask the council for some more bags, not even if they offer to pay the few pence needed to cover the cost. Instead, they must make a special request to the council which entails submitting to an assessment by a waste warden.

Anybody too busy to go through this process, perhaps because they have to work for a living in order to pay, among other bills, their council tax, can take their rubbish directly to the tip themselves until the next issue of blue bags.

Alternatively, they can put their rubbish in bags which are identical to blue bags in every respect apart from their colour and put them outside.

However, those bags will then go uncollected, apparently because if they were collected everybody from Totness to Inverness would begin making special trips to use our streets as a dumping ground.

Try as I might, I really can’t think how the system might be improved.

It’s like a well-oiled machine.

Bravery required to stamp out the drugs trade

A DRUG dealer called Rashaun Wright was jailed the other day for, among other things, being found with thousands of pounds’ worth of heroin and cocaine when police raided a shared home in Rodbourne.

Over the next few months, presumably having been bailed, he was found with drug cash in two further police raids.

Oh, and a search outside his London home yielded a shotgun and a handgun. His DNA was on the trigger of the latter.

Wright’s sentence for being involved in a trade which kills people, and for possessing weapons capable of killing people, came to a little under six-and-a-half years.

In other words, he’ll probably be free in about four years at most.

You can’t help wondering what’s the point of it all.

There are two ways of dealing with the Class A drug problem in this country.

One is to decriminalise the substances in question and offer users maintenance doses in officially-sanctioned clinics. This would render the Rashaun Wrights of this world obsolete.

The other option is to give everybody involved in the drug trade jail terms of such life-wrecking savagery as to be a very real deterrent.

Each of these options has its merits.

They are radically different solutions but they have something in common.

Making either of them happen would take a great deal of moral courage on the part of those who make our laws.

Unfortunately moral courage is a quality seemingly lacking among many in the upper echelons of society, which is why the drug trade will continue to rob some of our most vulnerable people of their lives.