BACK in the early 1970s, a new environmental lobby group by the name of Friends of the Earth launched a vigorous campaign against a leading soft drinks manufacturer's decision to discontinue sale-and-return bottles.

It seems like an age ago, yet threepence back then was very much a British institution.

Buy four bottles of dandelion and burdock from Mrs McBean's shop and you'd made an investment in a future quarter of pear drops and still have change for a penny chew.

Suffice to say that the death knell had been sounded for what was one of the most effective and ecologically-sound systems devised by man - and more than 30 years later, the consequences can be observed in every hedgerow, towpath and motorway embankment in the land.

But if the demise of money back on the bottle was deadly enough, then the advent of the metal drinks container must surely have been the coup de gras.

When I gaze upon the mess around Worcester, I reflect on how events hang by a gossamer-thin thread.

Who would have thought that such a simple system could have helped to ensure Britain's open spaces would have been kept relatively free of litter purely by a tiny cash incentive? All these years later, the ubiquitous drinks can has become the signature of the who-gives-a-damn society, blighting the landscape and threatening our besieged wildlife.

The drinks can is a menace that will hopefully one day become as obsolete as the wonderful tradition it so abruptly replaced.

- A YOUNG woman passed me near the Watergate and thrust a leaflet into my hand.

There it was, seemingly unchanged after decades the calling card of the Jehovah's Witnesses, still extravagantly optimistic about the coming times of plenty when war would be banished and suffering no more. The smug among us would regard such beliefs as total delusion - yet these might also be the very same people who every few years express their blind obedience to a British political party.