Most people over 30 will recall when wire supermarket trolleys were everywhere. They are now an endangered species.
In 1994 Rick Raubenheimer of Hurlingham, Johannesburg , told Stoep Talk how he discovered, well upstream along the Braamfontein Spruit, a wire supermarket trolley lying on its side in the grass. It was quite a distance from the Sandton Field and Study Centre’s park to where trolleys, in those days, liked to migrate to stand in the stream under the willows.
Raubenheimer said the trolley appeared to have died from exhaustion. Small children, oblivious of the tragedy were playing nearby.
He postulated that it had been foiled in its attempt to reach the park because the local council had – withoiut carrying out an environmmental impact assessment – placed a fence across the traditional migratory route used by them.
Raubenheimer’s observations triggered a surge of research into the ecology of wire trolleys and a theory developed that wire paperclips were the larval stage of wire trolleys and that the wire coat hanger was the intermediate stage.
A reader suggested that the paperclip stage was the sexual reproduction phase. She pointed out how, so often, when opening a box of paper clips one finds they are joyously entangled with one another. I have since made a point of knocking on a box of paperclips before opening it.
The theory of the metamorphosis of the wire paperclip to wire coat hanger to wire trolley received a considerable boost when, overnight, there appeared a range of quite different paperclips – brightly coloured plastic ones. The metal ones all but disappeared.
Was it yet another manifestation of global warming?
This was soon followed by the sudden appearance of brightly coloured plastic coat hangers.
And then emerged the brightly coloured plastic supermarket trolleys. Coincidence? Surely not.
The result was that the wire paperclip and wire coat hanger became near extinct. At the same time the wire trolley was moved on to the “Threatened” list and there is talk now of moving it to Schedule 2 on the “Endangered” List.
Then something else happened: suddenly supermarket trolleys were no longer migrating to our rivers.
No studies have been made on why plastic trolleys lack the migratory urges that were so manifest in wire trolleys. Sadly, the public appears to be unconcerned that toady’s children might be deprived of witnessing that traditional scene of a supermarket trolley resting under waterside willows along with abandoned washing machines.
Heaven forbid that this will lead to the extinction of the Big Five along our rivers – trolleys, washing machines, broken refrigerators, car tyres and car bodies.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Add new tag, environment, humour, stoep talk, supermarkets, trolleys
