When travelling by train, I am sometimes grateful for the newspapers others leave behind because they give me something to read. So if I finish a newspaper on a train, and leave it on the seat rather than put it in a bin, am I being a litter lout or showing consideration for other people by giving them the opportunity to share my paper?
It’s not just that there is a certain pleasure in opening your own, crisp newspaper (in which the crossword and Sudoku grids haven’t yet been filled in and where someone hasn’t already doodled a moustache and pointy ears on the photo of Clare Short announcing her latest conscience-driven resignation); it’s that leaving newspapers on trains is littering. It’s dispiriting enough that someone should leave behind their rubbish on a train seat without your aping their example. It is very different to reap some profit from a stranger’s bad behaviour on the one hand and, on the other, to perpetrate similar misbehaviour yourself.
You might wish to read a second-hand paper, and therefore relish finding one on your train seat: others might not. In the same way, you might feel peckish and wish to finish off a departed passenger’s half-eaten sandwich: most of us would not. So would that make the person who leaves a half-chewed cheese roll on his bus seat a mini-philanthropist? Or just a slob? Do you visit restaurants expecting to lean over to grab quarter-full bottles of wine, or unfinished almond tarts, left behind by sated diners who have just quit neighbouring tables?
Commuting is grim enough without having to sweep away old newspapers and coffee cups before you can even see your seat. Any goodwill element in your newspaper-bequeathing gesture is eclipsed by the mess you cause.
What’s your view? And do you have a dilemma of your own?
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