We've lost civic pride and the power to chide bad behaviour publicly

Telegraph

04-04-2025

David Sedaris is back on Radio 4 in the 6.30pm Tuesday slot, and not before time. I love his desiccated self-deprecation and this week's pensées on his audience with the Pope – risqué jokes included – had me laughing aloud.
Will the American satirist-cum-trash-vigilante return to his perennial subject of litter picking in his adopted UK address of West Sussex? I sincerely hope so. Sometimes, it takes an outside voice to deliver home truths.
'You can tell where my territory ends and the rest of England begins,' he wrote in The New Yorker. 'It's like going from the rose arbour in Sissinghurst to Fukushima after the tsunami.' Aged 68, he can still spend many hours a day picking up detritus and has even had a litter truck infelicitously named 'Pig Pen Sedaris' in his honour.
His enthusiasm is also undiminished, despite falling foul of Leftie critics when he observed that people who shop in Tesco Metro drop more litter than those who frequent Waitrose, then compounded his class crime by adding that he never found discarded opera tickets by the side of the road.
His solution would be draconian: set up roadblocks and fine any motorists with clean cars, his theory being that if there's no rubbish in the footwell or stuffed into the glove compartment, they must have thrown it out the window.
All very amusing but whenever he raises the subject, I can't help feeling uncomfortable that more of us don't see it as our duty to police our little patch of civilisation. Not just in terms of litter, but intervening in other respects too: when young people put their feet up on train seats, play music too loud, swear with venom in the presence of children.
My bugbear is the more mature traveller whose phone loudly rings and who takes about an hour and a half to fish it out of their pocket or bag, and then, instead of just answering the damn thing, stares at the number.
Understandable if it's a call they don't want to take – but it's not. Just as I'm filling in the back story – he's avoiding the bailiffs, she's bunking off work – they answer and proceed to have an excessively jolly exchange with their sister.
Irritating, but not grounds for a reprimand. Plus, there's karma to be considered; I too may well be slow and dithery before many more decades have passed.
It's the flagrant antisocial excesses of youth that are so dispiriting – and if I'm honest, the collective fear gripping adults like me. A decade ago, I would have had no hesitation in scolding kids making a mess or playing up. I would have considered it my civic duty.
Now? Not so much. As a dad I know put it: 'It's one thing to get stabbed for being a have-a-go hero and saving someone from a violent mugging. But I'm not prepared to risk a knife in the ribs over a discarded KFC bag.'
Researchers have recently suggested that our terribly English phraseology is baffling to the rest of the world and instead of 'I'm sorry, you seem to have dropped something', we should be far more direct, saying: 'Pick up that half-empty food carton. It's revolting.'
A brave move. But a foolhardy one too. It's one thing to chide a gaggle of foreign language students. Quite another to confront a mob of well-oiled football fans after an away loss.
So are diminishing civic standards (gasp! With apologies, Sir Keir!) a class issue? Not exclusively, but let's just say I've not yet heard Sedaris recounting how he read the riot act to a bunch of lairy dressage riders…