Milton is plagued with people wanting to collect your cast off clothes, books and other bric-a-brac for charity. Sometimes it’s genuine, most of the time it’s not.

Long time readers know that I used to try to alert you to every collection but they often only cover part of the village and in any case most of you should be wise to it by now. But it’s been a while since I mentioned it here and yet another bag came through the door this morning so here goes.

As a general rule of thumb the majority of people collecting in Milton are not collecting for charity. At all. They are commercial operations pure and simple. The leaflet may talk about creating work in eastern Europe or Africa, and indeed it does, but the majority of the profit will go to the UK company doing the collecting. To be fair to them if you read the leaflet carefully they are normally clear that this is what’s going on. It’s generally still not legal mind you, and SCDC do try to police it, but clearly with limited success.

What’s more concerning is that a minority of collectors who claim to be collecting for charities but aren’t. We had this last year in some parts of the village and also in Impington with a collection which apparently implied it was collecting for SOS Children’s Villages and was using a fake charity number.

And now it gets complicated. There are some commercial collectors who do collect for charities, so the charities do get a cut, but telling them from the rest is difficult.

So where does this leave you? You really have two options: there is really only one village organisation that does street collections on a systematic basis. It’s the scouts and they seem to do it every March and September so you could do what we do and stack up jumble in a corner ready for the next time.

Alternatively take it to the charity of your choice. There are two local obvious options:

• Emmaus just up the A10 opposite Waterbeach barracks
• the Children’s Hospice in Milton – take them to the office at 42 High Street (opposite the Waggon and Horses), not to the hospice.

If neither of those appeals then there are a host of charity shops in Cambridge, mainly in Burleigh Street but that’s pedestrianised so if you’ve got lots to hand over we find Cancer Research in Regents Street a worthy recipient as you can park outside.

Or you take a pragmatic approach and say that any re-cycling is better than binning it and give it to the next commercial company that passes. But go into the transaction with your eyes open.