Recyclage

On the stations of the metro in Lille - the brilliant virtually free train system - there are always dozens of orange dressed distributors eargely thrusting copies of the free Le Metro newpaper into the hands of passing commuters. If this is insufficient, there are always copies of three other papers in stands dotted about le gar (one called "Twenty Minutes" Q. - Why is "Twenty Minutes" called "Twenty Minutes"? A. Because it takes twenty minutes to read. No, because it takes twenty minutes to write.) They are unavoidable. They are rubbish. They are left on seats, they fall on the floors and get blown about all round the station. At the terminus of the line I get out and two orange clad cleaners get on and start putting all the left over papers in plastic recycling bags. The journals are then sent to a paper recycling usine where they are born again as the day after's newspapers.

With fifteen minutes of a class left and all the material exhausted I resort to recycling an old joke - What is the longest word in the English language? i) 'Elastic' because it stretches - they groan and protest ii) 'Smiles' - because there is a mile between the two 's''s to further outrage, and finally iii) 'antidisetablishmentarianism' - to puzzled silence. The longest word in the English language is, of course, 'work'.

I return home at the same time as a distributor of advertising magazines reaches our door. I explain, in my dog French, that it would save time if he just threw them into our recycling bin since that is their immediate destination. He is forbidden from doing this, he tells me, on pain of getting sacked and hands me half a kilo of brightly covered cheap paper which I throw into the recycling bin. He shrugs and heads towards next door.