In which your correspondent returns to the River Gipping

I've spent the morning calf deep in cool, refreshing water, doing good.

The River Gipping flows through Stowmarket, and was once canalised as far upstream as where the railway station now stands. However, it was never terribly deep, and now provides a sanctuary for the town's vast duck population, as well as providing a nice spot for a stroll on a summer afternoon.

The Pickerel Project works to keep the river tidy, and this morning, I joined their Patron for a session of litter picking. Apparently, you're supposed to wear wellies and gloves but, as a recovering city dweller, I don't possess such things (yet), so I put on my deck shoes, grab one of those 'grab stick' things and walked across the surface of the water.

Project activists have been working hard in previous weeks, so there isn't too much work to do. Curiously, one of the things you find a lot of is sliced bread bags. It seems that people feed the ducks, then throw the empty bag into the river, which seems rather counter-intuitive, i.e. S-T-U-P-I-D.

The water is actually pretty clean, and the ducklings were pretty cute so, all in all, it was quite a lot of fun. Besides, downstream, the river forms part of the boundary of Creeting St Peter Parish, so I've contributed to reducing river pollution levels in our lovely little corner of paradise...