What is it about face masks that I’m now finding them discarded on the pavement, on drainage grid covers, in supermarket car parks, in parks and gardens, all over my post code?
It was Les Jones from Practice Plan who made the single industrial glove famous, noticing and photographing them on his journalistic travels.
We enjoyed his speculations as to why a single glove would be left on the roadside at all and imagined what might have happened to its companion.
Now we have new genre of litter.
I’m trying to understand how and why abandoned face masks have started to appear.
Do people doff them as they leave shops and restaurants, casting them to the ground in disgust at having had to don in the first place?
”Take that society!”
Is there a new stress-related disorder manifesting itself in the year of Covid - butter-face?
”I’m sorry, I just can’t seem to keep hold of it.”
Perhaps there should be a new community service order, handed out to those people who discard their masks.
While we are at it, let’s include those who ignore social distancing rules, fumble with vegetables in the grocers, those drivers who think that 2020 is the year in which urban speed limits have been abolished or the families and friends who gather for parties in Greater Manchester’s gardens in such numbers that the police have asked whistle-blowers to stop calling because they are swamped.
Offenders can be given a big, green plastic bag and a pair of those pincers on the end of a stick and sent out to gather said face masks, after attending a day-centre where they are asked to write, 100 times, “I must stop being a completely selfish nob and start obeying the rules the same as normal people.”
In the interests of balance, perhaps face masks are either made of a special slippery material or have a sentient life force that drives them to escape to a place akin to the elephant’s graveyard. It might not be the fault of the owner.
For now, I’m just going to carry on grumbling like the old man I am becoming, every time I see one spread-eagled on the floor as I walk, run or cycle.
Or - perhaps - start collecting them myself, build a huge pile of them, take it to the Tate Modern and win The Turner Prize in 2021 for a new artwork intriguingly titled “The New Gloves” then sell it for millions.
Banksy watch out.
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