doing up the public!

On the estate where I live in North London we have a gardening club where, on occasions, small groups of people come together to do their public duty and plant bulbs, do weeding, and clear various piles of rubbish. Its great, but of course the same old faces turn up each time. So I am pretty impressed with the assumption here as expressed by Mayor Luzhkov that, come April, massive numbers of the local populace (93,000 expected) will do a city-wide spring clean.

He says there are to be two subbotniki, or working Saturdays - what used to be called public labour days in the Soviet period - clearing debris, cleaning monuments and planting flower beds. April 17 and 24.

Mind you, as Moscow alternates between snow and thaw, with an increasing shift to the second, the sheer amount of water, filthy melting snow and accumulated dirt and detritus indicates that such a show of public commitment is not just nice but necessary.