By Tim Porteus

AFTER our return from a final camping trip in the midges and mist, my youngest daughter started school. She needed an early-morning shower to remove the lingering smell of wood smoke in her hair this morning before getting ready.

She protested a bit, as she said she liked the smell of wood smoke because it reminded her of camping in the Highlands. But soon she was all excited to be dressed up, smart and clean for school. She is attending Prestonpans Infant School, as her big sister did before her, and as I did when it was the primary school.

She looked so smart and business-like as she walked into class with a beaming smile. We shared this moment with many other parents, who were taking the same photos and shedding similar tears. Only the day before, Skye had climbed the side of a mountain in Glencoe as if she had once been a mountain goat and proclaimed she wanted to live by a waterfall.

Now, all dressed to conform (although hair still looking slightly wild as she likes it), she has entered a formal system which in my day did its best to (literally) beat out any original creativity that didn’t fit in with teachers’ expectations.

But as our daughter walked through the same doors I had once gone through, I was uplifted by a hopeful expectation that when we come to pick her up she will be less smart, less clean and her hair even wilder. That’s what school should be like for a wee girl not yet reached five. And I know she is in good hands in that respect at Prestonpans Infants.

But as I kissed her goodbye this morning, she asked: “Can we have tea by a campfire in the woods?” The campfire had been the communal focus during our camping trip. As darkness fell, the spirit of the fire glowed brighter and danced with our imaginations as we told stories and riddles with each other. I of course agreed, but her comment helped me think of which tale to tell this week.

Much of our summer has been spent exploring the wonders of East Lothian. We explored beaches and caves. We climbed hills and moors. We swam and paddled in rivers, climbed trees and sat under them having picnics.

But wherever we went there was one thing that we always saw, even in quite remote places: litter. Sometimes there was more, sometimes there was less, but we couldn’t escape it. My children notice it I suppose because I mention it. Our children pick up other people’s litter as we walk, so we now need an extra rucksack to carry it.

“Why do people do this?” asked my nine-year-old after she had watched a family sitting in a car in a car park by a beach. They had been eating sandwiches and drinking juice, and then threw all the packaging out of the windows. The plastic juice bottles rolled about in the breeze and the sandwich packaging blew away and got caught in some sea buckthorn bushes nearby. The family then drove away, no doubt having had a nice day at the beach, but leaving their rubbish for others to enjoy.

I make no apologies for sounding angry at this. And I do not blame the children, it’s the adults who frame this behaviour. I understand people want to keep their cars tidy but I couldn’t answer my daughter’s question as we sat watching someone else’s rubbish desecrate a beauty spot. I just can’t understand the mindset. So all I said was: “Well they just don’t know any better I suppose, or maybe just don’t care.”

“That’s so sad,” she replied, then went very quiet. Then she came up with an answer to the problem: a story:

‘The king of the sea told all the mermaids not to go close to the shore because of the dangerous litter that humans pollute it with. One mermaid asked what litter was and the king replied it was many things, such as broken glass and plastic which kills sea creatures, as well as making the place humans live look ugly.

“Why do they do this?” asked the mermaid. The king shrugged his shoulders, and said: “They must be less clever than the animals they kill.”

But one day the mermaid disobeyed her king and swam to the shore close to the beach at North Berwick. But her tail was cut by broken glass and then she got caught in plastic bags floating on the surface. She was in trouble and a fisherman saw her.

He helped her remove the bags and gave her cream for her cut tail.

“Why do you people do this?” she asked him. He felt ashamed because he also would throw litter. He promised her he would never do it again. But there was so much rubbish in the sea that they agreed they would try and collect it.

So the mermaid gathered her friends and collected the rubbish. The fisherman’s boat was soon so full that it nearly sank, and when he returned to the harbour people saw the mountain of rubbish he had caught. They laughed at him, thinking he was not a good fisherman because all he had caught was litter and rubbish.

“Look,” said the fisherman, “this is what we are doing to the sea and the land. Why do we do this?” But nobody cared.

“This is impossible, we can’t collect all of it,” said the mermaid, “and every day the wind blows more into the sea.”

“It’s hopeless, people will never change,” said the fisherman. But the mermaid was angry: “They must change or else we will all die, including them too eventually.”

Mermaids have powers to control the wind. They can whip up storms and so she decided she would make a very unusual, magic storm.

The wind blew not everywhere but where the litter lay. It blew all the rubbish thrown by the humans back into their houses and cars. People woke up with broken glass in their beds and plastic bags covering their children. Their homes were piled high with dangerous and ugly rubbish. When they tried to get rid of it, it just blew back in.

The countryside and sea became wonderfully litter free because of this magic storm, and when people littered the storm whipped up again and blew it straight into their house or car. They couldn’t escape from it. People were living knee-deep in the rubbish they had thrown out of windows or not recycled.

So soon they stopped littering because now they understood what it meant for the other creatures. Finally they cared, because they were the ones who suffered most. At last they got the wisdom of the animals.’

This story, I think, would make the perfect start to any school day.