Published: Thursday, 3rd July, 2008 2:03pm

It's not easy being green - unfortunately it has its ugly side

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Maurice O'Brien

TRICKY business it was getting round my part of Tilehurst at the weekend.

Gateway after gateway of West Berkshire Council's new green boxes containing newspapers, magazines and cereal packets, ignored and abandoned until Monday morning, 72 hours after they should have been collected. Brave new world makes stuttering start.

Bottles had been collected only 24 hours late, restricting the local yobbery to just one smashing night's fun.

But contemplating the array of tubs disfiguring a normally neat neighbourhood merely served to underline what an ugly business going green's become.

We pay small fortunes to tart up the exterior of our homes, but there's no air-brushing those bins. Not everyone has the garden space to accommodate a wheely bin or two, a couple of recycling boxes and the canvas-style affair into which West Berkshire wants us to place plastic bottles.

Some, understandably, don't even try.

Many occupants of terraced houses have given up on their once carefully-tended, little front gardens. Where else can they park the wheely bin without twice-weekly skid marks on the hall carpet trundling to and fro the back yard?

Even worse are the so-called houses of multiple occupation served by jumbo four-wheelers.

Next time you're driving along Tilehurst Road take a shufti at Belle Vue Road. Tidy little houses, but one blank gable end permanently scarred with a line-up of often overladen jumbos.

And while we're talking ugly, what about Gordon Brown. Not the Downing Street gargoyle himself, but what he calls "the greatest revolution in our energy policy since the advent of nuclear power".

One occasional wind turbine, like our own at GreenPark, might prove an eye-catching tourist lure, but littering rows of them over moorland and hillside, or across the North Sea, is utter vandalism. Forget for a second that the 2,000 turbines already slowly turning in this country produce less spark than a solitary, average-sized conventional power station, whatever happened to the shrill voices of the conservation movement who once pledged their lives to preserve the natural beauty of our countryside?

Talking of which, what kind of hooligan chooses to build eco-towns on green, rolling, unspoiled landscapes, rather than use them to cover up any one of hundreds of inner city open sores?

- WHY don't they leave the NHS alone?

Joined up thinking be damned, after 60 years of political meddling it's not even close.

Only last week it was polyclinics (presumably handy if one's sick as a parrot) and by Monday we'd got a new 10-year plan. Pray tell, what happened to the last 11 years, let alone the whole 60?

- HAVING survived 27 years on Robben Island, torture, marriage to Winnie, and an Alan Titchmarsh garden makeover, what did Nelson Mandela do to deserve Amy Winehouse at his 90th birthday bash?