Royal Wedding

Cleaning up after the royal wedding collected 140 tonnes of rubbish in the capital alone. Across the country, one million people enjoyed street parties, with 5500 formal road closures nationwide and 825 in London. Even more had garden parties and gatherings of friends.

Who can resist an excuse for a party? Even the republican lot had ‘not the royal wedding’ parties.

So, here we are, at the end of our 4-day weekend, and the beer bottles, dirty plates and furniture all over the place. Today’s the day to clean up.

If your royal wedding party went on much longer than expected, you’ll still have people hanging around – and if your street and neighbours are suddenly some of your closest friends – why not continue the fun with a little cleaning up party?

Before games start, if you had bunting up and flags draped everywhere, take them down carefully and store it all ready for next year’s jubilee.

Then, let the games begin.

1. Rubbish Race
Each house has a roll of plastic bags and 1 hour to fill them. The house with the most collected rubbish outside gets a prize (there must be some leftover bubbles somewhere!).

2. Bottletastic
Collect as many bottles as you can and see which house can get the most into the recycling as possible. Do point out there should be no fighting over the bottles in case of injuries!

3. Sweeping Relay
Presumably the street sweepers will be around at some point, but if the ones in your area aren’t very regular visitors, you could have a sweeping relay race: position teams along the road. The first of each team stands at the top of the road with the broom. The second members of the team waiting 30m down the road, the 3rd member, 60m, and so on. Keep the teams close together, so as much of the street is swept as possible. On the whistle, teams sweep their tranch of the street, leave a pile where the second member is and the second moves to the third. A support team then comes and sweeps the piles up for each team. The winners have the cleanest tranch of the street and all their piles swept away.

4. Stick the Furniture in the Garden
If you had everyone’s garden furniture out in the street, the fun comes with trying to return it. Put all of the furniture in one place and arrange teams. The teams have to guess which furniture belongs to which house and put it in the garden. To keep this a useful game, have one member of each household at the gate to his or her house to say whether it’s their family’s or not. If not, the furniture item goes back to the pile.

There’s no reason cleaning up after such a lot of fun can’t keep the fun moving. Enjoy each other’s company and get the street back in order all in one.