By: Blonde Two
The answer to this strange interrogatory is, of course, ‘yes’. If I did away with you, and left your body on top of Mam Tor in the Peak District (to join the banana skin above), eventually you would while away to nothing.
It wouldn’t be very nice though, would it, for all of those lovely walkers, who ascend the tor to appreciate the shivering (look it up) and the view (the mist is also nice), to find you lying there decomposing?
The same goes for banana skins… and orange peel… and apple cores (and probably pomegranate seeds). You would be amazed (or perhaps not) how many outdoors people I have seen discard fruit matter on the grass but pick up all of their other litter.
The fact of the matter is that things take a wee while to decompose. Here is some information to help you understand:
A glass bottle will take 1-2 million years to decompose (take it home).
Cigarette butts will take 10 – 12 years to decompose (take them home).
Orange peel will take 6 months to decompose (take it home).
An apple core will take 2 months to decompose (take it home).
Banana peel will take 3 – 4 weeks to decompose (take it home).
I am sure you will agree that none of us really want to see any of the above lying around our beauty spots. Besides which, it is far more fun to find a manky old apple core in your rucksack weeks later…
I’m with you all the way on this. Such perpetrators should be put in the stocks and have ripe fruit thrown at them. BUT, I have a confession to make. On my South West Coast Path walk this summer I had bought a large “de-luxe sausage roll” at the Dartmouth Castle café – here is the follow up from my journal:
“Back to me lunching on a panoramic viewpoint high above the sea. I took a bite of my sausage roll. It turned out to be sickenly, and violently currie flavoured and the thick surrounding pastry was like soggy cardboard, almost impossible to bite through. I stood up and threw the dam thing as far as I could over the cliff, and I’m pretty sure it went into the sea.”
Twas one of those great moments of liberation, with that strange pleasurable feeling promoted by being naughty.
Well I think we can forgive you that one, as I am fairly sure that given the choice between eating the horrid sausage roll and leaving it next to the Mam Tor trig point (had you been there), you would have taken one for the landscape.