I�m used to the Monday morning vomit parade as I walk into work. You know, the post-weekend pools of vomit on the footpath, congregating around the entrances to night clubs and pubs. An unattractive and often smelly obstacle course to begin the week. Generally by the end of the day the vomit mosaic is gone.

In recent weeks, however, I have noticed with concern that Monday mornings now bring not only vomit, but also dog shit. And that doesn�t go away by Tuesday morning.

After years of largely successful campaigns to get dog walkers to carry a plastic bag and pick up the freshly dropped dog turds as they go along, it seems that a severe case of poo fatigue has hit the city.

Walking along my regular route to work has required, over the last month or so, a significant amount of concentration to ensure that I don�t step in dog shit. In the middle of the footpath, not just in the little garden bits surrounding the trees, or pushed off to the side. And other issues aside, I don�t want to have to be paying that much attention when I walk to work in the mornings. All I want to be is awake enough to put one foot in front of the other and look both ways when I reach a road. I don�t want to have to be staring at the path in front of me to make sure I don�t get caked in crap.

There seems to be a significant build up on Mondays. I guess people are being more lazy with the shit patrol (TM my Dad) on weekends, or more lazy with the actual walking of the dogs during the week. But unlike the vomit, nobody seems to be hosing the poo away during the day on Monday. Rather, it remains there, in the middle of the footpath, until it desiccates, gets washed away with the rain (ha! we�ve been in a drought for 4 or 5 years), or some poor sole steps in it and mushes it down.

It�s unpleasant and unnecessary.

Over the weekend I moved several car loads of stuff to my new place (leading to cuts, scrapes, bruises, blisters, a strained hamstring and a sore back, woohoo!), which required me to cross back and forth over the median strip which divides my street. And it�s a lovely median strip, wide, with large trees and thick grass. The only trouble being that it�s poo central.

When I first moved into this area, years ago, you never walked up and down the grass, especially not at night, because it was known to be the place where all dogs being walked stopped to do their business. But over the years the pick-up-the-shit campaign did wonders for the little piece of parkland in front of my house. You could sit on the grass under a tree in the summer and read happily in the knowledge that except in very rare cases your neighbours took their dog turds home with them.

But not now. Now the shit has returned. Each time I walked across the grass yesterday I took a slightly different route, convinced that it must only be one patch. After half a dozen crossings I gave up and went back to using the road.

Stupid poo. Stupid people who are too lazy, again, to pick up after themselves. And be assured, I blame only the people, not the dogs. Speaking of which, in the course of driving around the neighbourhood several times yesterday ferrying boxes from one residence to another, I saw an unusually large array of puppies being walked. From the woman with the four whippets, to the guy with the Lab puppies, the woman with some kind of giant wolf hound crossed with a mastiff type animal, and the woman with the Great Dane.

And while I have no reason to suspect any of those walkers for being responsible for the poo epidemic, I�m certainly going to tread very carefully in the areas I saw those giant animals being walked.