I WAS enjoying a leisurely stroll through North Street Gardens and paused for a couple of minutes to admire the John Snow memorial.

I knew the story of the Broad Street pump and the part it played in identifying cholera as a water borne disease but I hadn’t realised, until then, that John Snow was a native of York.

Unfortunately, that warm glow of civic pride lasted for about 20 seconds.

I spotted, in the guise of empty cans and discarded food wrappers, a rather less satisfying, but unfortunately much more eye catching, monument to another York contribution to the “improvement” of public health.

John Snow is a member of that great pantheon of men and women, observers, statisticians, doctors and scientists, who see the obvious in the seemingly random and unravel it.

However, I doubt the combined genius of Nightingale, Jenner and Einstein could explain how it is that the strength of a human being to transport an object, sometimes a distance of miles or more, is so reduced by the consumption of the contents that they can’t drag themselves 3ft to an adjacent disposal point, or even transport, the now much lighter burden, home.

How civilised countries care for their public spaces should be a matter of both private and civic pride; York is undoubtedly one of the jewels in Britain’s crown, but you are starting to have to squint very selectively to see any of the diamonds.

Richard Bowen, Farrar Street, York