Recycling.
Inspired by a short of hippos in a zoo in Denmark being invited to help clear up after Halloween.
Recycling in Ankh-Morpork: the long-standing problem of what to do with all those pumpkins left over on the morning after All Fallows' is over and the festivities are ended. The undeniable problem is this: everybody buys them but nobody actually wants to eat them. And how many times in this month of Ember have we walked down a street to smell the rot of a discarded pumpkin, or very nearly slipped in the slimy orange-coloured slush of a decaying discarded vegetable?
Well, the Ankh-Morpork City Zoo has pioneered the initiative of what to do with your old all Fallows' pumpkin, and for this we at the Times owe them our thanks and support. The canny Zoo director Doctor Smith-Rhodes, no doubt from experience and practical observation in her native Rimwards Howondaland where hippos are as common a riparine-dweller as rats and voles and otters are here(1), has publicised a Come And Feed The Hippos campaign. People are encouraged to bring their pumpkin to the Zoo and are even paying a couple of extra pennies to dispose appropriately of their leftovers. They get the thrill of feeding the animals, the hippos get a treat, the Zoo not only saves on its feed bills but also gets a couple of pennies per person for it. Everybody benefits, Doctor Johanna Smith-Rhodes assured us. (2)
Asked if this is not a matter of concern to Sir Harry King, who is being deprived of the waste and would have an opinion to express, she assured us she had thought of this, and Sir Harry had been proud to being his grandchildren to the Zoo to open the initiative and allow his little ones to lob the first pumpkins into a grateful maw. Besides, she said, Sir Harry gets the speciality dung from the Zoo and has sole contract to collect and dispose of a premium prodict of great value to the city's gardeners and smallholders. He knows a good thing when he sees it and isn't an unreasonable man. he also dotes on the grandkids and loves the way their little eyes lit up with childish delight.
Several cartloads of redundant pumpkins have been sent over to Ramkin Manor, which hosts the City's totemic hippopotami, Roderick and Keith, in a discreetly guarded ornamental pond, where the two very close friends have resided since the unfortunate fire at the Guild of Heralds. It was decided at the time of the founding of the Zoo that they were happiest here, and indeed resisted all tentative moves to transfer them.
(1) At least, in the cleaner upriver stretches of the Ankh and those of its tributary rivers, whose waters have no idea of what their destination is. Riparine life in our stretch of the Ankh is - different. and is the subject of very specialised study in Ankh Ecology. This is largely carried out by Assassins' Guild students who have displeased Doctor Smith-Rhodes, in her other professional capacity as principal teacher of Zoology at the Assassins' Guild School
(2) Actually, she said "ivvirrrybody binifits". But we are not ones to point out the differences in accentation of Morporkian, as articulated by Rimwards Howondalandians. Not with a licenced and experienced Assassin.