What do the following all have in common?

A Plastic Sheet.

A Macdonalds Drink Carton

A Concrete Slab

The top of a Renault parts box.

An Empty Coke bottle

Old Newspapers

Chocolate Sweet Wrappers

A Highland Spring Water Bottle

No it’s not the contents of the Generation Game conveyer belt. In fact it’s the litter scattered in the hedge on my walk each day down Lottbridge Drove. I once saw a small rabbit come out of the hedge but he quickly ran back in!

The things some people just throw away!

Do you remember your favourite Christmas present?

Mine was Casdon Soccer, Christmas 1973. I was 13 years old and I unwrapped a soccer game with a picture of Kevin Keegan on the front.

The game was brilliant a plastic soccer pitch, where you controlled the players by moving two knobs at the end. You could pass the ball between the players or just go for the ‘long ball’ option and ‘flick’ it to the other end. The players had little rings around the base which would help you control the ball, but for the experienced player these were taken away. In the days before PC’s and ‘Football Manager’ I used to run my own leagues and play matches for hours.

The magazine ‘Shoot’ had cardboard league tables and fixture list, I would use these to see where teams where I the table. I spent hours on the game and when the plastic goals finally broke; my dad made me some metal goals which had real ‘netting’!!!

You never forget your favourite present and this was certainly mine!

So let me get this right, Steve McClaren the England manager gets the sack after his England team loses a football game. So we did not qualify for the European Championships well big deal, no one died!!

On the other hand Police Commissioner Ian Blair survived a no-confidence vote and kept his job and someone did die through the actions of his team!!!

“On November 1 Blair's force was found guilty in an unprecedented trial under workplace health and safety laws of failing to protect the public over the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, shot dead by officers on an underground train on July 22, 2005.”

It is a funny old world !!

LONDON (AFP) - A Czech lorry driver was stranded for three nights in south-west England after his satellite navigation system directed him down a narrow country lane, British newspapers reported Friday.

Yuri Odenhai, 45, was on his way to pick up a cargo of televisions from a depot in the county of Devon when his 40-tonne truck became stuck fast on a sharp bend near the village of Ivybridge, east of Plymouth.

The trucker's company, Kohlman and Hasek, refused to pay for an expensive recovery operation at the weekend, meaning the 50-foot (15-metre) long, eight-feet wide truck remained wedged in place.

Newspapers said Odenhai had tried to ask for directions before following the sat-nav down the lane but his English was not up to scratch and he could not make himself understood.

The lorry was eventually towed out by a tractor after a tree surgeon cut away surrounding vegetation.

Mat Auburn, 19, said his family took pity on Odenhai and invited him in for meals during his ordeal, striking up a friendship. But he preferred to stay in his cab overnight rather than find bed and breakfast accommodation.

"The diversion put a few miles on people's journeys. He had stopped near a house to ask for directions but the woman couldn't understand him," Auburn was quoted as telling The Times.

"LONDON (AFP) - Foreign students visiting Britain are to be educated in the etiquette of queuing for buses, after local users complained about them not observing the conventions of standing in line.

Southern Vectis, which operates buses on the Isle of Wight, off England's south coast, said it was to contact local language schools following several complaints about the behaviour of young students over the summer months.

"On the Isle of Wight we get lots of foreign language students staying with families," said operations manager March Morgan Huws.

"In their cultures, they do not queue for buses where they live and there is a scrum every time a bus turns up, while in British culture there is a nice orderly queue.

"We have had quite a few complaints from residents who queue up in an orderly fashion then all those foreign students push past them.

"What we have said is that we will work with the language schools to provide some instructions on the etiquette of queuing. We won't be marching the students up and down showing them how to queue, we will just leave it up to the group leaders to pass on the information."

Orderly queuing -- as seen during the recent Northern Rock banking crisis -- is seen as a quintessentially British convention. One social anthropologist believes Britons are even capable of forming one-person queues at bus stops.

But while queue-barging normally leads to tutting, muttered complaints and shuffling to close the gap on anyone looking to barge ahead, most people are too polite to directly confront a transgressor."

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia (AFP) - Slovakia's biggest airport Tuesday began relocating ground squirrels near the complex as they were endangering flights by attracting large birds.

We started moving the first animals today," Bratislava airport spokeswoman Zora Kalouskova told AFP, adding that around half of the estimated 1,000-strong ground squirrels could be relocated from fields bordering the airport.

The squirrels attracted large birds of prey. This often led to bird hits or caused them to be sucked into the engines of planes either landing and taking off.

The ground squirrels will are being relocated to an area about 40 kilometres (25 miles) away where holes have already been dug to house them.

"HELSINKI (AFP) - A squirrel that charmed Finland this summer by turning up daily at a supermarket for chocolate eggs has now been banned from the premises.

Thanks to the manager of the SIWA supermarket in Jyvaskyla, a city of 85,000 people in the heart of Finland, the squirrel skipped through the open front door every day and made a beeline to the confectionery section.

There it helped itself to one particular European brand of chocolate egg -- notable for including a little plastic toy inside -- before scampering back outdoors to savour the treat.

"The squirrel is prohibited from entering," an employee at the supermarket told AFP on Thursday. "It's a decision of the health authorities. The door of the store has remained open all summer, but now it will be shut."

Amused customers had dipped into their wallets to pay for the goodies."

Looks like Finland have the same problem with Health and Safety bods as we do !!!