SIR — Having contacted St Albans District Council regarding my missed rubbish collection last week, I felt in need of a rant. I ve been informed there will be no green-bin collection until the week after next. By that time, the food scraps I dutifully wra

SIR - Having contacted St Albans District Council regarding my missed rubbish collection last week, I felt in need of a rant.

I've been informed there will be no green-bin collection until the week after next. By that time, the food scraps I dutifully wrapped in newspaper and stuffed into cereal boxes - again on advice from the sages at the district council - will be decomposing nicely next to the ever-increasing pile of glass that had its collection skipped last fortnight.

The path outside my home is starting to resemble the hovel of an alcoholic hippie.

Although some in the council offices may think I complain needlessly, my plastic bottles were collected on time. The market for plastic must still be strong in China; appears be a glut on the glass though.

Each morning I'm now walking where the Romans walked along their enduring wall as the path next to it is more suitable to sledging and my spiked mountaineering boots are in for polishing.

I'm sure that throughout St Albans, chippies are being raided and their salt seized as contraband and confiscated. Somewhere in the great warren of local governement is the poor employee who didn't get their bonus last year, nursing blisters from opening all those little packets. Salt into the wound, we all hope.

Schools were closed, bins left festering in the chill morning air, buses cancelled, trains afraid of snow, roads and paths ice-coated death traps and chippies ransacked - the horror mounts. All for the bargain-basement price of six inches of snow and �160 council tax a month.

Somehow I feel cheated.

LISA SHUTTLEWORTH,

Prospect Road, St Albans.