I have mentioned the litter situation involving the school up the road.

The Potted Heid school as it was once nicknamed, famous for producing engineers, captains of industry, and the odd poet. I know it for discarded soft drinks cans and food receptacles stuffed into hedges.

I became a groundhog day Victor Meldrew, perpetually harvesting crisp pokes from the lawn. I took a black bin bag of assorted items to show the head teacher. He said he could do nothing.

He had neither chastisements nor inducements for his pupils.

Anyway it was the fault of the PFI company who rebuilt the school and cut costs by not having an assembly hall or a Tannoy system for him to communicate with the weans.

How to deal with the problem? My idea was blockade the street, exclude the litteratti, and impose a policy of not in our front yard. With a band of guerrilla west end pensioners skilled in hand-to-hand combat ready to make citizen's arrests.

Snipers on tenement rooftops would not go amiss. Flesh wounds only. Ask David Cameron to set an example by calling in air strikes. At least put the issue on the agenda at the G20 summit.

Her Indoors had the sensible suggestion of persuading Glasgow City Council to provide more litter bins. So it came to pass that there is a bin on the lamppost at our gate.

In the movie Field of Dreams they say build it and they will come. We put up a bin and the kids use it. Turns out they are not natural born litter louts. Miraculously, the council sends a nice binman around to empty it. About 90% of the litter has vanished.

The problem now is magpies who empty the contents of the bin on to the pavement in search of scraps of food. You can, apparently, set snipers on these troublesome birds. Or at least trap and dispose of them.

Adult humans remain an issue. Like the passer-by who stuffed three pizza boxes, each the size of a coffee table, into the small bin. The magpies had a substantial meal.

Sometimes there is no room at the bin for the kids' rubbish because one bloke uses it for his empty bottles. Judging by the variety of spirits he gets through in a week, it is no surprise he can't walk round the corner to the bottle bank.