I cannot drop litter. It’s impossible. I will walk 10 miles with an empty plastic bottle in search of a bin if I have to, because chucking it in the bushes where it will go unnoticed alongside similar rubbish strewn over weeks and months, is simply unthinkable. My whole being recoils at the notion. It’s not because I’m worried that the bottle isn’t biodegradable. I’m not anxious that a badger will choke on it (although I wouldn’t be pleased at the idea either). It’s that my father instilled in me, from an early age, the idea that dropping litter was egregiously antisocial, contemptuous of the social contract, a moral failure. He didn’t put it like that (I think he mentioned hanging people), but it was clear what he meant. He never knew his father and grew up practically an orphan, and I’m not sure what instilled the belief in him, except perhaps that the age he grew up in was one where certain behaviours were simply unacceptable. Li…