Mysterious bits of Lego, lonely dice, mountains of disposable tat — a parent’s home is a plastic nightmare

I’m still enjoying the warm afterglow of Father’s Day. Tea and croissants in bed, since you ask, followed by eight hours of screaming, whining and fighting (The kids were well behaved, though, so heigh-ho). It’s with this celebration of parenthood in mind that my thoughts turn to plastics — or, as the dude in The Graduate called them: “Plastics.”

I applaud this newspaper’s campaign on disposable drinking straws with a glad heart. Ever since I read Donovan Hohn’s excellent Moby-Duck, thoughts of pelagic plastic have floated ceaselessly around the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre of my mind. But disposable drinking straws are just the start.

You don’t really know plastic — not seriously — until you have kids. You probably think you have a lot of plastic in your house. You don’t. Few non-parents will even have heard of VTech; parents tic and shudder at the very mention of this Moloch of chirping battery-operated tat. Non-parents think there are different sorts of Lego: Star Wars Lego, X-Men Lego, Ninja Lego and so on. Parents know it’s all Caltrop Lego.

Have children, and the interstices of your house fill with tiddlywinks, orphaned dice, solitary Connect Four counters, lugubrious plastic cows, ladders to nowhere, Playmobil hairstyles adrift from their owners; mysterious beads and bands. And all of this, one day, will find its way into landfill or into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where long after your great-great-great-grandchildren have returned unto dust it will be merrily strangling cormorants and drifting into the interiors of zooplankton and lugworms.

My friend Horatio Clare — a writer who has a strong interest in the sea — has had a bright idea. He notices that the tattiest of all the plastic tat that laps around the ankles of the parents of young children comes tumbling off the front of the kids’ magazines on the bottom shelf of the newsagents.

Every one comes with a cover-mounted “free gift” (ha ha): fairy princess lockets; Peppa Pig watches; decoder rings; Batman whizzer-launchers... most of which disintegrate before you get the magazine home. You can, Horatio points out with rolled eye, follow the adventures of the eco-heroic underwater explorers Octonauts on CBeebies, and then buy magazines bundled with, as he puts it, “crummy plastic Octonauts toys destined for the ocean”.

He knows the market for these magazines is competitive. And he thinks the handful of publishers that produce most of them — National Geographic, Redan, Egmont and Immediate Media — “know it’s wrong, would probably love to drop the tat, but commercially they must feel they can’t unless they all do”.

So Horatio is campaigning via social media and email to encourage them, as one, to do just that. The issue is gaining traction on social media, and so far he’s had promising but non-promising responses — that is, all four publishers have responded to tell him they’re going to respond.

Wouldn’t it be a joy if they did the right thing? Go on, lads: just think of dear Captain Barnacles gasping his last with a plastic magazine bag wrapped around his head like the victim in a Scandi crime drama. Do it for the Octonauts.

Hail a writer who reports his worst work

It’s easy to assume that those of great reputation ascend without interruption on wings of talent and charm. So how cheering it is to hear that a blistering 1976 memo has come to light from an editor at the New York Times to a young Seymour Hersh in response to Hersh grumbling about the editing of his work.

“Sy” is a multiple prize-winning investigative journalist, and at this stage had already made his reputation exposing the My Lai massacre.

He was told: “It should interest you to note that at this moment a good part of the New York Times has come to a standstill because the deputy managing editor, one assistant managing editor, one acting national editor and one assistant national editor are all tied up as they have been all day, and for days past, in trying to get your series into printable form.

“It seems to me that if I were a reporter whose work needed that much attention I would be slightly embarrassed and hugely grateful.”

Yowch. And how exactly did this come out? Well, Hersh reproduced it in his new memoir Reporter. That shows class.

*Vicky Beeching is an Oxford-trained theologian, a star of the Christian music charts and was tipped for ordination by the Archbishop of Canterbury. But since she came out as gay she lost her record contract was shunned by her church and received death threats. On the verge of training to become a priest, she was told privately by clergy that she’d have to promise to forgo sex.

She has now decided not to try, saying: “My career and vocation are blocked by a stained-glass ceiling.” I’m not a Christian, so it’s not my fight. It’s their club. But who’d be a member of a club like that?