It’s a busy time for those of us training to be noble social workers, with deadlines flying at us like poisoned ninja stars thrown by essay mercenaries of death. But Mother Earth has neither time nor patience and so last weekend or maybe the weekend before we took to the river and Wombled its ass as part of the National Spring Clean.

The clean up was organised by a local group of do-gooders going by the name of Friends of the River Blank. I can’t tell you which river they’re friends with, obviously, or it’d help you piece together the clues to my real identity. Let’s call it the River Brian. No, Kevin. Friends of the River Kelvin.

I have here my official field report. Apologies for the quality of the photos, they were taken with a mobile telephone. I had taken my camera along but sadly dropped one of the batteries in the river, polluting it worse than before we’d turned up. We collected a load of rubbish from the river banks and surrounding park and recycled a ton of glass bottles, plastic cans and aluminium fizzy pop cans. But there were also some larger matters to attend to:

Some of the volunteers brought a grappling hook to liberate four rusty shopping trolleys from the murky depths.

And we fished some dickhead’s front door from the river. Because some dickhead had thrown their front door in a river.

But fear not. We know where they live:

Also, those are not my ears.

Photo credit: The Zero