Welcome to Peninsula Methodist Church Church

The end of PMC’s July Church Council meeting was insight. We were all getting a bit restless and couldn’t wait for it to finish, just like children at the end of a busy school day. I could just imagine us fighting for the door to see who could escape first into the bright sunshine. 

As it was the meeting had gone quite well under the circumstances and under two hours. Not bad! 

We were up to ‘Any Other Business’ on the Agenda. Was there ‘any other business’?

Silence. Apparently not, until a lone voice spoke.

“I was wondering……………….whether we could start a Litter Picking Group for Cliffe Road.”

(Cliffe Road is the road outside the Church. This being quite a busy fairway which gradually rises as you proceed further along and usually involves quite a lot of puffing and panting near the top, when on foot. And it is rather a long road.)

The person who was wondering went on to explain that as the wind usually blew down the road, litter amassed at the bottom making it look a ‘right mess’. Plus also there is a corner shop just across the road where bottles and cans tend to congregate, also the Cecil Arms public house is situated just a short way away where used glasses and sometimes broken bottles are left waiting to be kicked along the path. 

Straight away there were mumbles of agreement and lots of nodding heads. Bart was the first one to speak.

“Great idea. A Community Outreach. When can we start?” 

After a short discussion about what was needed and what day was best we eventually finished the meeting with a plan of action. Friday afternoons at 2pm after the dustmen had been round to collect the household rubbish.

Bart lent us some hi-vis waist coats, litter pickers and ‘the things which hold the rubbish bags open from Ebbsfleet and we thought we were ready. However we were told that a Risk Assessment had to be done and it was found that the intended date wasn’t really convenient as it would be August soon and start of the holiday season, so this was postponed until the end of the month.

In the meantime the Council were contacted to see if there was anything we needed to know before starting.

A lovely email was received back from Julia at the Environmental Engagement Office, with an attachment of an official Risk Assessment document, which we only had to acknowledge receipt of. “Do you need any equipment”, she asked? So we opted for everything she suggested. Hi-vis waist coats, litter pickers, the things that keep the bags open and rubbish sacks. Julia promptly delivered these the same day with a Hugh smile and said that anything else she could help us with just contact her.

The allotted day dawned sunny and hot and five of us met just before 2 o’clock at the church. We donned our waist coats, put on disposable gloves and collected out pickers and bags and sallied forth. 

It was agreed that one person would collect cans and bottles in order that we could recycle them and the rest of us did the general rubbish.

Bart produced a board on which was written that the ‘The Methodist Church are in the process of Litter Picking in this area’.

We all started out quite enthusiastically, even though it was a hot day, and arrived back after about an hour with five full bags of assorted rubbish. I won’t go into what was in the sacks as you really wouldn’t won’t to know. Needless to say we all thoroughly washed our hands afterwards after disposing of our disposable gloves.

Bart suggested that he took our photos with the rubbish we had collected but we are a very shy bunch at PMC and flatly refused to have our faces splashed across the circuit magazine.

One good thing which did come out of our efforts was that people did stop and say ‘thank you’ or ‘well done’ and we hope that in the future people will recognise us as we litter pick and that conversations will start. Hence the ‘Outreach’ will begin. Who knows what the future holds!

Before we all departed Bart prayed for our community and we left feeling we had done  some good. It was thus decided that we should do this each Friday in the hope that each week it would get easier.

Sunday – after the Friday Litter Picking.

The wind had been much stronger on the Saturday and on arriving on the Sunday morning to worship, the wind had blown rubbish from the top of the hill to the bottom and the road was now worse than it was on Friday. Oh well, there’s always another Friday!!