YOUR correspondent Zillah O'Hara is correct. Rubbish does choke spring flowers, and not only on Pitchcroft.

Worcester is a filthy city because people don't care.

Our brand new Tallow Hill, as E Hussey says, is now bestrewn with the detritus of gormless morons, probably the same gormless morons that have bespattered every square yard of our pavements and our public buildings.

Worcester is a tip. When was the last person hauled before the magistrates for "littering?" Could it be 100 years ago? CCTV cameras now dot our city. How many have been prosecuted?

I was a child of a generation that "boxed your ears" - without warning - if you stepped out of line. Parents do not enforce such parental disciplines on today's children. Indeed a "box around the ears" would certainly result in some do-gooder taking the parent to task.

"Littering" then was a no-no. It was one of the disciplines enforced on children of my generation. And like many of our society's older tenets, it's now ignored.

It no longer bothers me that I live in a filthy city. I have reached the age at which you begin to realise the nation you were born into no longer exists. It now belongs to today's generation of parents.

And many don't know, or care, what their children get up to. That is why John Phillpott says of children, in the Phillpott File that "some parents refused to believe their offspring could behave in such a way."

Our couldn't-care-less society, fashioned by the idiot liberal intelligentsia of the 60s and 70s, has been blossoming now for two generations.

Litter is only the most obvious manifestation of a society going down the tube. The don't care's are too numerous.

And we'd better get used to our filthy city. That's what the majority wants.

N TAYLOR, Worcester.