WITHOUT sounding like a pompous prig (hard for me, I know) I do try to be a good citizen.

Call me naive, but it never ceases to amaze me how selfish and thoughtless people can be.

Eighty per cent of crime is carried out by a small core of people. It got me wondering if this figure might also apply to the following “anti-social citizens”, prevalent in Rossendale.

l Dog Poo: nowadays you don’t see dogs wandering around alone, you see “nice” dog lovers parading their pooches, yet a small number of these let their dogs poo where they like.

l Lazy parkers: the council has temporarily done away with disc parking, hoping shoppers will be attracted by unlimited parking, but what has happened is town centre workers, who when disc parking was in force happily parked a couple of hundred yards away on long stay, now insist on parking as close to their place of work as possible. Consequently the car parks are full. These thoughtless souls don’t realise that the result will be introduced paid-for parking.

l Litter: that gets me so mad. A lot of it is kids, obviously not instilled with the same horror as most of us about dropping litter, if parents taught them in the first place it wouldn’t be a problem.

l Inconsiderate driving: people moan and groan about congestion, yet I believe if drivers would learn to filter and not feel they were ‘giving in’ it could be reduced by 50% in an instant.

l Bad parking: an example being the issues relating to Alder Grange school. There are morons who park anywhere and if challenged would say “there’s no lines so I can park there” (especially the air head woman in the silver ‘02 Fiesta).

I could go on and on. If only the selfish few would realise how thoughtless they were, what a different Valley we would live in.