I’ve just carried out my own mini-redd up. Checking out various etymological dictionaries, no one seems sure of the origin of the term, though the most authoritative attribute it to old Scots.
It just means “tidy up”, and I’m not referring to the hoose, which gets its annual redd up every Christmas. No, I’m referring to the foreshore. I was inspired to behave thus by a fabulous Australian fellow I met on a shoreline walk on Skye.
He was carrying a couple of carrier bags. As readers know, I’m a one-man vigilante gang (fair enough, some say super-hero), ever on the lookout for suspicious behaviour. Accordingly, I hailed the fellow: “Hoy, you there, with the Australian look about you: what’s in the bags?”
My new pal explained that he regularly picked up detritus from the beach. “Well, it’s nice to have a hobby,” I said, before preparing to move on swiftly. But then this public-spirited soul explained that, a few months earlier, a rare dolphin (forget the name; something to do with a beak, perhaps?) had washed ashore nearby.
Leading citizens had made several attempts to save it, but it kept coming back. Clearly, it was in distress and seemed determined to die. In the end, it had to be put down. A post-mortem was carried out, and it was found to have several kilograms of plastic detritus in its guts. It had been unable to feed itself.
My Antipodean buddy was upset by the situation, so made it his job to do his bit at least. I told him about how, in an island community where I’d once lived, we’d had an annual Voar (Spring) Redd Up, in which every area of the joint was cleaned up by volunteers. He wished they’d had something similar in Skye.
Now, oddly enough, on my shoreline walk near The Cabin, on Skye, I’d remarked a considerable amount of litter, too: plastic cartons, tins, strips of polythene and so forth. So, inspired by the fine fellow at Rubha Ardnish, I conducted my own redd up: and collected two full black bags!
Most of this stuff comes in from the sea, but you do wonder about Scotland sometimes. We seem to have a worse predilection for dropping litter than most countries do. It’s what people who go to other countries always say when they come back: “Lovely place. It was right clean, ken?”
I think I told you about the time that, due to a horticultural aberration that would have bamboozled even Titchmarsh, a hole appeared in my high suburban hedge. And people passing by would push litter through it. Who does such a thing? What is going through their heads or whichever part of the anatomy contains their microscopic brains?
My own admittedly pocket-edition brain buzzed with pious pleasure after my work on the foreshore. I’ll probably do it again, though the nice Aussie warned me that the activity could become obsessive. Even as we spoke, he kept spotting (or thinking he’d spotted) something out of the corner of his eye that he feared did not belong among the sands and stones of Mother Nature’s shore.
I won’t become like that but, from time to time, I’ll do my bit – and have a wee Rab Redd Up.
