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A FEW months ago, I flicked a fag in the street. I really shouldn’t have. It was daft. I got caught. Written out one of them £80 fines.

Since April 2007, Glasgow City Council have been issuing on the spot fines to people caught littering. But since 2012, there’s an alternative to paying the fine. You can choose to spend three hours picking up litter around Glasgow instead.

Couple of weeks later, a letter comes through saying that I can either pay the fine or attend a 'Fine or Time' event. The letter strongly urges that I take part in the event, and explains that we’ve all to meet outside the Jury’s Inn at 10am.

Living in such a filthy city as Glasgow, I’ve always just seen dropping litter as the norm. I don’t blatantly drop rubbish, but most times when I finish a cigarette, I just drop it. As a smoker, I’ve never really thought of the impact of cigarette litter alone.

GCC has issued around five times as many fines for dropping cigarette butts as other kinds of litter combined. Last year they fined 17,162 people. The number of people caught has increased since July 2008 by 15,000. There’s a temptation to think it’s ridiculous for them to do it, to have one-drop-doesn’t-cause-the-waterfall thought process. But if we’re all doing it, it mounts up.

Through about 20% wanting to write about it, 10% civic mindedness, and 70% I'm-not-paying-eighty-quid-for-flicking-away-a-fag, I went along to the ‘event’, as they weirdly insisted on calling it.

It was actually not bad; the time passed fairly quickly and everyone seemed to be there for the same thing. It was a nice day; sun was out. We met outside the Jury's Inn in town, and I knew these were my people as I saw them all smoking as we waited, making a point to go and put their fags out on top of the bin.

We all stood swapping stories. The conversations were peppered with rants about how they should be fining real criminals, how we’d done nothing wrong, those guys just stand around waiting for people to slip up. But we knew we shouldn’t have done it, and no amount of half-hearted guilty protestations would change that.

I got stuck with a close-talker named Jim. He explained in great detail why cigarette litter was an aside to the real issue: Greggs litter. He detailed his grand theory that the Greggs at George Square gives out clear packets so nobody knows how much the litter is theirs. I smiled politely, nodding in the right places, throwing in an occasional “Shockin’ ‘int it.” Into the mix.

I let out a sigh of relief as two men with an armful of litter picking gear appeared from round the corner.

The facilitator was jovial, letting us all know that we could choose to see it as a punishment or an opportunity. He handed out gloves, litterpicks, high vis vests and binbags. And suncream, which I thought was weird, but I'm sunburnt now so aye.

We got on our way, working in a circle of about four miles, spreading out across the pavement with a semblance of order. Jokes were made about how we should all be wearing stripey jumpsuits and carrying pickaxes over our shoulders instead of litterpicks. I'm pretty handy with one now; picking up dowts with them is an art. Nobody really complained; we knew why we were there.

Now. Picking up a doubt as I said is an art. You can’t just come at it head on. It requires finesse. Much like they say about guns in the movies: squeeze the trigger; don’t yank it.

Know your litterpick. Give it a name if you’re that way inclined. Mine was called Sally, and she tasted many a manky fag-end that day.

We were warned not to pick up dowts as we were crossing the road. But we got quite into it, and I wish I could’ve captured my walk and grab technique.

We covered quite a large area, and made it a bit cleaner. But if we'd stayed on the first street, the dozen of us wouldn't have removed all the litter. It all felt a bit futile and depressing.

There was no point putting the road signs, pieces of wood and glass in our bags, we were told, as they'd burst them and possibly injure us.

But it's amazing the sheer amount of rubbish in such a small part of Glasgow - cigarettes in particular.

You’d spend hours removing every dowt from one street, and there’d be 50 more the next day. There were some areas where we had to just give up; we stood picking up rubbish from massive piles for a while, before being asked to move on by the facilitators.

Very much a wee spruce up, as opposed to a deep clean.

So we didn’t make much of a dunt in Glasgow’s litter epidemic. It put me in mind of bringing a dustpan and brush to an earthquake – or a mop to a tsunami.

My fellow fag-flickers and I debated what the point was; what was the actual point if we couldn't properly clean it up? Wasn't there anything more useful to do?

We all came to the conclusion that that wasn't important - it made it look a little bit better, for a little while, which was better than nothing. We conceded that we could spend all day on one street and make it look immaculate... but then it would be the same later that week - if not that day.

To be honest, I feel like the short term cleaning up the streets isn't the goal in this scheme.

During the process, we all got talking about rubbish – literally and figuratively - , and were disgusted by the stuff we found. Maybe this scheme's making people more mindful of their environment - and making them think twice about littering.

We all tied up our first full rubbish bags at the halfway point and stopped for a break – and for most of us, a smoke. We all lined up, sheepishly sticking our fag-ends in someone’s bin-bag, muttering cheers. The entire time I was smoking I had a maniacal urge to just flick it though…

The organiser told us about the attitudes of children that came along on litter picks, how they changed so quickly, moving to chide others for dropping litter. He also told us that quite a few people had been to one of these events and then came back to volunteer.

Whether this scheme is making a tangible, short term difference in the amount of litter in the city or not, it felt like it was making a long term difference in the minds of everyone taking part.

Surprisingly, since the fine or time scheme began, most people have opted to pay the fine, rather than ‘doing the time’. Only 256 out of 20,000 plus litterers chose to clean up rather than pay the fine. I’d suggest you do: it’s cheaper and genuinely not at all horrible.

However, 96 people this year have chosen to pick up litter instead, a trend which –if it continues - suggests two possible things. People are becoming more mindful of their environment; or simply more skint…