The bathtub is the most fertile location for bloggery. How readily the unstructured ideas pour into the head when the torso is immersed in hot water. There must be waterproof keyboards around by now. Keyboards! What a laborious means of expressing oneself. No doubt some cunning cerebral implant will one day let us see the characters and pictures stream onto the screen just as we imagine them. Idleness is the mother of invention. Chewing and digesting raw meat is hard work; invent fire, cooking, ... the microwave. Thinking is such hard work; invent .... no let us not go down there! To the Cynic school of philosophy all the works of mankind, so laboriously developed, were superfluous shortcuts, sucked into existence by desire for idleness. Happiness, they asserted, can only be attained by rejecting what is not necessary. When Diogenes of Sinope saw a child cupping her hands to drink from a stream he threw away his cup.

There was a time, after the first World War, when the horizon was tinged with hope and optimism. Did you ever see one of those marvellous posters from the 1920s advertising a railway or maybe a charabanc company? A healthy glowing couple stride through a fabulous panorama of mountains, dressed in shorts, with knapsacks on their backs, beneath a magnificent skyscape of blue sky and towering white cumuli. She is blond and carrying a hiking staff. He is smoking a pipe and carries a map. From his face and her figure you can tell that they have just been discussing his translations of Proust and that she leads callisthenics classes at a Steiner school; their faces are flushed. This optimism can still be glimpsed in Nordic countries, the last refuges of the enlightenment. In Britain there was the Depression, then the austerity following the second World War; in the sixties hope returned, to be extinguished by fears of nuclear annihilation, the ravages of Mrs T, the worship of greed and the relentless belittling of all cultural activity not subverted to the worship of Mammon.

There probably was not as much litter in Britain in the 1920s; plastic packaging had yet to come. Hogarth's scenes of London suggest that we have always been a dirty crew, but I do not remember there being as much litter during my childhood in the 1940s. Maybe that is the effect of rosy spectacles. Other European countries seem notably cleaner. The psychology of littering offers us a broad playing field for the traditional pleasures of prejudice, snobbery and disgust. Planning sketches for new developments are always patently unrealistic because they omit the sea of litter through which their architectural novelties will be thrusting up like islands. There was a time when science fiction never depicted the litter of the future, whether in illustration or in film, but Dark Star broke that mould , and films like Blade Runner catch the new mood of grunge perfectly. Now that we are awakening to the reality of global warming, fantasy will take a new turn. How quaint the utopian dreams of taming nature with science will come to seem. Read Stand on Zanzibar to see that dystopian literature has been much nearer the mark.

The earth is the mother of all . It was the entrepreneurial greed of the corn dealers of Aspendus in the first century AD that brought famine to its inhabitants and this chilling threat from Apollonius of Tyana when he learned of their behaviour:

Apollonius to the corn dealers of Aspendus:
The earth is the mother of all, for she is just.
But you, being unjust, make out that she is the mother of you only
and if you do not stop I will not let you remain upon her.

These terse words, written (not spoken - Apollonius was under a self-imposed five-year vow of silence) so long ago still make the hair at the back of my neck stand up. When I see the ubiquitous litter in lands where the people are so devout, I wonder why they disrespect our universal mother. We in the West are all encouraged to be the corn dealers now. The rising temperatures, winds and seas will be our rebuke. If the earth is our mother, the sun is our father. If you do not stop I am telling your father, I seem to hear. Apollonius of Tyana was revered as a sage throughout the ancient world. Hadrian erected a temple to him in Rome and there were many others in the cities round the Mediterranean. Centuries later, in 271 AD Queen Zenobia of Palmyra made a break for independence and proclaimed her son as a rival to the emperor, Aurelian. During the campaign against Palmyra, Aurelian arrived at Tyana to find its gates closed against him because its inhabitants had taken the side of Zenobia. In rage he swore In this town I will leave not a dog alive. That night Aurelian dreamed that Apollonius came and spoke to him, in Latin, saying

Aurelian, if you wish to win, do not think you need to kill my citizens.
Aurelian, if you wish to rule, abstain from the blood of the innocent.
Aurelian, be merciful, if you wish to live.

The next day the town was betrayed by one of its inhabitants, Heraclammon, who knew a secret entrance, and it was captured without bloodshed. Heraclammon was killed by Aurelian's soldiers by mistake, but because of Aurelian's dream nobody else died. When the soldiers, not knowing how to act, reminded him of his oath, he replied "Alright then; kill all the dogs".