London Trash Talk

July 6, 2026

My Neopets BFF and I went to England together in 2018. Our flight landed in London around 10 or 11 p.m., and we were hungry. Around midnight we dropped our shit off at the weird little Airbnb we stayed at, then walked to a nearby McDonald's. So cosmopolitan.

As we walked, we noticed that the streets were absolutely piled with trash. As a person who sat through more than a few anti-litterbug school assemblies as a child, I was shocked and appalled.

After choking down our dry burgers (they were severely lacking in ketchup), we started walking back to the Airbnb. And that's when we saw it. Just ahead, a garbage truck was headed in the same direction. As it crept down the street, two or three men followed behind, each holding a big snow shovel. They shoveled trash from the street into the back of the garbage truck. In the process, at least half of every shovelful fell back to the ground. They just kept going.

Don't get me wrong, we saw a lot of interesting stuff on that trip. Somewhere on the way to Stonehenge, our bus passed a really neat chalk horse. But the thing I remember most is all that trash.

Well, maybe that isn't entirely true. The chalk horse comes up a lot. Mostly because I bring it up. I acknowledge that I might be the only person in the history of that bus who thought it was cool. My Neopets BFF was asleep when we passed it.

Worse, she still doesn't seem to care that she missed it. I searched our messages for "chalk horse" and found this exchange from four years ago:

me: let's go back to England
me: maybe we can see some cool chalk horses you can sleep through again
her: what did I sleep through?

Then I brought it up again a few weeks ago:

me: I'm gonna write a blog post about the trash we saw in England
me: and the time you fell asleep as we drove past the chalk horse
her: lmfao what chalk horse

OK fine, the chalk horse was not the only Culturally Important thing we saw. We sweat our tits off hoofing it along the cliffs in Dover. Big Ben was under scaffolding. We got scolded at the Roman Baths. We bought NSYNC shirts at Primark and stood on our bed taking selfies as Love Island played in the background.

But still. All that trash.