THIS nation spends a fortune teaching us from the moment we vacate the cradle that recycling is good but dropping litter and fly tipping are most decidedly bad.

There can hardly be a classroom in the land without anti-litter slogans, painted by eager young hands, or where zealous tutors aren't urging their charges to enter some environmentally-friendly contest designed to push any one of a number of green messages.

Sadly we taxpayers would not appear to be getting our money's worth because all around us there is evidence that people of all ages have neither the strength nor inclination to seek out the nearest rubbish receptacle, or pop the detritus of their lives in their pockets or in the car boot and take it home with them.

One morning last week the first spring clearance of the front garden yielded four crisp packets, three drink cartons, two crushed plastic bottles, assorted sweet wrappers, two withered felt tip pens, the lid from a child's lunch box and half a plastic cowboy. Top half, if you're asking.

The prize discovery, however, was a sheet of A4 paper neatly folded in four, one side covered in precisely spaced and tabulated lines of computer-created type.

I reproduce its anonymous contents exactly word for word: "Were pollution is normally seen...

When oil tanks out at sea sink and the oil spills kills many fish and nature.

When people are wasting items.

When people put to much water in the kettle to boil it uses more power that you should be using for one cup of tea/coffee.

We use so much electricity the ice from the arctic is melting and all the animals that live there are dyeing."

There are three primaries and a secondary school within a discarded lollipop stick's throw of chez moi but I guess the author wasn't necessarily a pupil or, God forbid, a teacher.

That said, I'm not sure which is the most appalling; the decidedly dodgy dogma or the atrocious standards of literacy.

SO Muammar Gaddafi joins the likes of Saddam Hussain and Radovan Karad�i as one of our erstwhile buddies for whom all the fun's gone out of playing footsie with the West.

Quite why this tyrant who murders his own people is any different to the others who do it is something of a mystery.

But just make sure you're never the one to tell Robert Mugabe someone's struck oil in Zimbabwe!