The Daily Mail says we Britons will chuck out 736,571 tonnes of refuse – just because of Christmas. Or, according to official sources, 3 tons (someone’s talking rubbish).

Anyway – it’s a lot. Just look at my drive this morning. A family of 5 with relatives stopping over can generate a lot of junk. I’m glad we can recycle a lot, but it makes me ashamed to be putting out so much empty wrapping/ bottles/ food containers to celebrate that God came to a stable. This, in a world where more than 58 million kids are suffering acute malnutrition and 146 million are malnourished (a nice way to say they’re slowly starving to death).

Starvation is the leading cause of child death in the world at the beginning of the (21st. Many of those who don’t actually die in the first couple of years will instead grow up stunted and deformed because of the deprivation of their early years.

In 2000, our government and other world leaders promised to halve child poverty by 2015, back then it was at 29%. Now, half way through, the malnutrition rate has gone down by just 2% to 27% (making poverty history?). The indications are that by 2015 at present rates there will be many more malnourished children than there are today.

The UK spends less than 1p per malnourished child a day. The EU spends less than 3 cents.

That really is rubbish.