Selly Oak is a dump and it’s all our fault

Manoeuvring though a rotten sea of abandoned Aldi produce, interspersed with multiple wheelie bin hurdles and urban feral cats, has become part of the norm of living in Selly. And it is us students that make Selly a slum, where the streets crawl with septicaemia, salmonella and cystitis. But why are we so content to live in a landfill?

Can’t we just clean up?!

Considering there is a bin every two steps there seems no feasible excuse for the titanic scale of littering that occurs, and is there such a shortage of toilets in Selly that the expelling of bodily fluids has to become a public spectacle?! Maybe the reason we feel so comfortable making mess is that our uni houses aren’t home home, so we feel no obligation to care for them? Or maybe mess has become such a normal part of Selly Oak living that we feel no obligation to challenge it? Or maybe we have grown to love moist mattresses and exploding bin liners?

Where did those boots even come from?!

I doubt it. Selly, under the reign of students, has become a place where you would be ashamed to show your mum, a place where just falling over poses a serious health risk. Well I am sick of trying to avoid bubonic plague infection. So next time you are about to abandon chicken, splatter ketchup or smash a glass in a post-Fab drunken littering frenzy just think … do you really want to live in a bio-hazard obstacle course? Are you really happy living in an apocalyptic warzone? Is trudging through a lethal primeval soup of decomposing ready-meals and vomit puddles really what you want people to associate with your address?

And if the answer is yes then please contain your squalor to behind your front door, not in front of mine.