It is rubbish to call our great green city filthy

Bags of rubbish left in the street act like food magnets for thousands of seagulls and hundreds of foxes that have decided to live there.

The city has more food outlets than anywhere else in the country outside London and food means rubbish.

It attracts large numbers of tourists, especially day trippers, who might try to keep their own home streets clean but have no worries about discarding rubbish in Brighton.

There are also thousands of students whose priorities are not always cleanliness and tidiness. Many people live in bedsits which have nowhere for leaving rubbish to be collected by binmen.

Strong winds blow rubbish all over the place so that even the most ardent apostles of cleanliness cannot always catch it. Strong sunlight can turn discarded food rancid remarkably swiftly.

Some of the travellers who come to Brighton are none too fussy about litter while there are always plenty of fly-tippers prepared to spoil the countryside.

You might think Brighton and Hove, as a green city, would be well up the recycling league table. You would be wrong.

There is far more recycling in the verdant countryside areas such as Wealden where people have enough space to sort out rubbish than there is in the crowded, cramped city by the sea.

I hear people moan that rubbish is getting worse in Brighton and Hove. But I think they may be mistaken. The city is doing its best.

Not many years ago, Brighton’s binmen were famed for negotiating such short working hours with the council that many of them had second jobs in the afternoons.

Before plastic sacks were in widespread use, most household dustbins were filled with a glutinous mixture of ash, rotten vegetables and tins that was never properly cleared and which consequently stank.

Before wheelie bins came along, any sack left out was likely to be attacked. The bins are far more efficient and save dustmen a lot of effort.

Street sweeping is far better than it was. Beaches and popular parks are cleaned in the evenings and often during the day, whereas once they were never touched even on Bank Holiday weekends.

Beaches used to be covered several times a year with oil discharged from ships in the English Channel but even that seldom happens these days.

There are recycling bins all over the city and sorting out material which can be used again is fairly simple especially now that differently coloured glass bottles can be placed together.

I find the household collections of recycling extremely efficient and most effective. Composting, which can be done even in the smallest gardens, is surprisingly satisfying.

Of course more could and should be done. It’s strange that foil, the first substance I ever recycled, is no longer salvaged.

It might be a good idea to put a deposit on bottles of drinks. When that was tried many years ago it attracted an army of children keen to earn some extra money.

Recycling bins are not always signposted well, often being obscured by parked cars and many are in poor condition.

A few well-advertised prosecutions for dropping litter might make many folk think twice before carelessly discarding refuse.

Recycling rates could be displayed on notice boards as part of a campaign for people to take pride in a green, clean city.

But for people to complain Brighton and Hove is a filthy city – that’s rubbish.

September was always a busy time for people like me who played both cricket and football at weekends.

The cricket season ended on the last Sunday of the month while football was well under way from the start of September.

Sometimes the Sunday football matches were moved forward to cater for this clash while cricket had to start earlier anyway as the evenings drew in.

But now there are few such clashes. At a national level, there are hardly any players excelling at both sports as Denis Compton and Ian Botham did in the past.

Parks football has suffered a steep decline in recent years while parks cricket seems to be on its last legs. I spotted hardly any matches this summer.

I am not too worried about football since it remains popular and is played today anywhere with at least two people, a couple of coats for goalposts, and a ball.

But cricket is much more difficult and expensive to arrange. Games are also too long to fit into the lives of sports enthusiasts who work and have families.

I always like watching parks cricket with its wayward bowling and agricultural batting from people whose honest best was never going to reach a high level.

But I am afraid it is past the point of recovery and amateur cricket will soon be the sole province of the public schools.