And yet, how many times have I walked past the rubbish in the pond in my town’s park without paying attention—or, at least, without doing anything about it?

I often read Surfers Against Sewage newsletters and I admire their slick, effective campaigning—cool people doing cool things to clean up cool places. But even if I were cool enough to be a surfer, I don’t live anywhere near the sea.

So I was surprised to see on their website that a cleanup was being planned—not on a rugged beach, but at what I might unkindly describe as a rather uninspiring suburban duck pond just south of London, in Bromley.

I shouldered my paddleboard and set off to get involved.

Three police officers arrived as Andrew and I were inflating our paddleboards. I assumed our little mission was about to be shut down— for trespassing, health and safety, or something equally tedious.

But no. The police were delighted we were going to clean the pond. They were fully supportive.

I pulled on my wellies, rubber gloves and very important hi-vis vest, then paddled out onto one of the rankest, skankiest, mankiest, dankest, smelliest bodies of water I’ve ever had the pleasure of floating on.

We joked about whether this was a world-first expedition—the first-ever paddleboarding outing on the Bromley duck pond.

And then we got to work, filling bag after bag with the usual suspects of Lucozade and Coca-Cola bottles, McDonalds’ cups, and the compulsory traffic-cones-lobbed-into-ponds-for-a-laugh.

We stopped for a break, and I looked with different eyes at the single-use pointlessness of my plastic crisp packet. Two minutes of hungry Hula Hoop-tastiness, followed by 500 years of the wrapper sitting at the bottom of a landfill. Or a duck pond.

I asked Andrew and one of the other volunteers how they had first been galvanised to get involved with environmental action. I was surprised by how similar their stories were.

Both had been brought to activism through health struggles that forced them to reassess their priorities. They had worked their way back to health, and along the way found mindfulness and, crucially, had been invited by others to come along and join in at environmental meetings.

Through this, they had separately discovered purpose, direction, and companionship.

I hauled a heavy bollard from the water and heaved out a wooden pallet. Being a weirdly competitive person, I took delight in finding unusual items.

We both bagged a traffic cone.

I found a giant Christmas bauble and a soggy stuffed unicorn.

We both found dolls.

I found a plastic Harrods bag, weighed down with a brick, containing a pair of shoes, some underwear, and an empty olive oil bottle. Strange and intriguing.

We filled bag after bag — booze bottles, lost footballs, a snapped tennis racket, half a skateboard, a Thomas the Tank Engine toy.

It sounds strange to say, but it was also an enjoyable paddleboard outing. Tiring. Technical. Rewarding. Interesting.

I shudder slightly that I even consider calling it an “adventure”.

But it was certainly more memorable than lots of times I’ve paddled absentmindedly across an empty lake.

Even though I’d never been to this park before—and, to be honest, am probably unlikely to ever go again—it felt good to have gone to that community and made just a little bit of a difference.

Why don’t you have a look on the Surfers Against Sewage website and see if there’s a group event near you as part of their Million Mile Clean?

This feels like a strange concluding sentence for a story about pulling manky rubbish out of a smelly pond in a grubby park beneath ugly concrete tower blocks, but it was really good fun.