Alison Pickford (Postbag, September 7) starts off with a good little thought that somebody should be collecting up the litter scattered in her local wood near Safeways and Mcdonald's.

But she ends with the unfair idea that these shops and the others at Townsend Way should employ gangs of workpersons to gather it all up, when all the time the guilty ones are their customers (the litter-dropping ones) whose wind-born scraps of paper and plastic end up as little lines of dirty washing dancing on the barbed-wire fences opposite.

Actually, shops already employ, via business rates and commercial rubbish collection charges, the Malvern Hills District Council to do it for them; and there are even rumours of an elusive man in a white van marked "Litter Patrol".

If Ms Pickford's plan were, in fairness, to apply to all shops including Malvern Wells Post Office, I can just picture my local shopkeeper's apoplexy at the thought of having to rush round Wells Road after 6pm chasing empty crisp-packets when she's been up at 5am doing the morning newspapers.

Personally, I seldom go to Safeways, but if the shops weren't wanted by a lot of people then nobody would go there.

Perhaps we could make any convicted local vandals do their Community Service pursuing rubbish by wading streams and shinning up trees clad in Beckham and Owen replica shirts, which they get to keep if they fill five bags full. Playground despoilers, Winter Gardens wreckers, abandoned property smashers, graveyard druggists and even the phantom tyre-puncturer of Church Street could all be kept publicly busy around Malvern.

Rather than sponsor a cheap holiday jolly jog along some picturesque foreign landmark dodging the other tourists, I would support a local clear-up of fields, orchards, footpaths and other locations where non-lager-swilling, but otherwise upright and even church-going citizens, have sometimes dumped alien grass clippings and tree loppings more properly disposed of in their own gardens.

C R Cheeseman,

Wells Road, Malvern Wells.