A few months ago, I flicked a fag in the street. Should’t’ve. Was daft. Got caught. Written out one of them £80 fines.

Couple of weeks later, a letter comes through saying that I can either pay the fine (boo) or attend a ‘Fine or Time’ event. The letter strongly urges that i take part in the event, and explains that it’s 3 hours of picking up litter.

Through about 20% wanting to write about it, 10% civic mindedness, and 70% I’m-not-paying-eighty-quid-for-flicking-a-fag, I went along to the event yesterday.

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 fag out on top of the bin.

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 our litterpicks. I’m pretty handy with one now; picking up dowts with them is an art. Nobody really complained; I think we all understood why we were there.

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. 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.

I asked the guy 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? He explained that that wasn’t important – it made it look a little bit better, for a little while, which was better than nothing. He told me 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 litter, 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 dropping stuff.

The organiser told us about the attitudes of children that came along on litter picks, how they changed so quickly 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 or not this scheme is making a tangible, short term difference in the amount of litter in the city, it felt like it was making a long term difference in the minds of everyone taking part.

I’ve just ordered one of those wee disposable ashtrays on Amazon…