Skivvy

The wife brought it up the other day. Just dropped it into the conversation like a self-cleaning grenade.

"Why don't we get a cleaner?"

A what?

I confess I initially recoiled. Who the hell had she killed? This is what comes of waving a handgun around in the back of the car with the safety catch left off. One speed bump and boom. Death by hair trigger and then you have to spend the rest of the day being nice to Harvey Keitel while he picks some dude's brains out of your furry dice. And no, that is not a euphemism for oral pleasure.

Turns out the wife actually meant get a cleaner. A Mrs Overall. A Mrs Doyle.

A skivvy.

Someone to come and do for us (though that still sounds a bit Pulp Fiction-esque to me).

The wife's argument is thus: she and I both work full time, when we have any free time we are battling a constant malaise of exhaustion that raising kids prevents you from ever giving in to so you keep pushing and pushing yourself with the end result that your effectiveness as a careerist / parent / homeowner shrivels down into a depressing spiral of endlessly diminishing returns.

Now I'm not saying that our home deserves to feature on a Channel 4 documentary fronted by the spectacularly fronted Jasmine Harman (though she's more than welcome to rifle through my Tallboy any time she likes) but, you know, sometimes things get left. For a few weeks. And I put it to you that having water cress growing out of your draining board is not a look that will entice Nigella Lawson around for an evening meal. And that's even before she negotiates the sometimes tacky floor of the bathroom on her way to powder her nose.

We do our best but our best isn't good enough. Our best certainly isn't up to the 1950's ideal that my Nan and mum embodied when I was growing up. But, of course, looking after the home was and is a full time job in itself (especially when you throw young kids and cats into the mix) and they lived in an age where a woman having a career and going out to work full-time was unusual and, outrageously from the modern perspective, a bit of a talking point. Neither of them worked full-time in the career sense. Though in terms of labouring to maintain a spotlessly clean home they never bloody stopped.

So. We - Karen and I - are considering hiring a skivvy.

I feel surprisingly ambivalent about it.

My first reaction was kind of an inverse snobbery borne of my thick overlay of working class ideals and a deep sense of class embarrassment: what the hell would my friends say? What would my mother say? My second reaction was to begrudge the money: are we really going to give away hard earned moolah to someone else so they can come into our home and do the jobs that we would and could do (albeit haphazardly) for free? My third was the English Man defending his castle stance: have some grubby faced dole-ite invading our home, pocketing our loose change and hijacking our wifi when we're not looking?

Was my wife utterly mad?

But as the idea has lain with me and snuggled up softly, gently pushed sugar kisses into my ear and raised its eyebrows suggestively I have started to see the positives.

(a) More free time and energy to do the things we really want to do. (b) A more hygienic, more healthy standard of living that the wife and I, the kids and even the cats would benefit from. (c) Someone who can scrub the bloodstains out of the backseat of the car for a lot less tin than Harvey Keitel asks for.

We shall ask for references naturally and have to think carefully about keeping any kind of monetary temptation out of view. My wife will be at home on the days the cleaner comes round. And my Lego sanctuary... er... "office" will be out of bounds to uninitiated duster-wielding hands.

With those provisos in place, I am slowly coming round to the idea.

So hello, Upper Middle Class.

Who knew that a slightly grubby lifestyle would lead so effortlessly to upwards mobility?

A Mug’s Game

It’s always nice when a friend emails you something funny and / or interesting with the excuse that “I saw this and thought of you”. It makes you feel special, that you’re on another human being’s radar and it allows you to cast aspersions as to what kind of person they consider you to be.

Take the following link that my good friend at Sunny Side Up emailed to me the other day: http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/mumsnet_classics/1875847-Do-you-dunk-your-penis

Just read through the various replies and consider how this sticky subject applies to you.

For those of you too suspicious or too busy to follow the link basically it opens up a huge internet dialogue on the subject of post coital cleansing. It seems that one enterprising couple keeps a mug of water by their bedside table into which the man immerses his dirty appendage while his wife hogs the bathroom thus individually and simultaneously ridding themselves of the more uncomfortable aspect of the post lovemaking glow [i.e. the stickiness of sated appetite]. Personally removing the gimp mask is a higher priority for me but we’ll let that pass for now.

Of course, it begs the question: is this normal? Although that question is transmuted into the far safer and less politically fractious: do other people do this too?

As you will see from the comments and replies in the link, although the mug has a lot going for it in terms of convenience (providing the mug isn’t painfully shallow) there does exist a danger that your early morning mug of tea might be a lot milkier than you would normally take it if you do not exercise some care when selecting your first beverage of the day.

I must confess that I myself do not utilize a mug, bucket or trough but am happy to avail myself of a couple of wet wipes or even the shower (should I have been particularly adventurous and wild) and consider this to be pretty normal.

I am now wondering if maybe there is a missed marketing opportunity in the offing here. Not so much in the line of speciality mugs – I mean why pay a premium for a “special” mug when your favourite Willy-Wonka mug will do the job just as well for a fraction of the price? I’m talking speciality equipment. Some kind of nob hoover. Although I suppose a Vax would be a better analogy. Or even some kind of miniature washing device like a car wash that one could strap on, plug in and pour in the Mr Matey Bubble Bath and hey presto! Bang and the dirt is gone. Although on second thoughts maybe mixing water, electricity and genitals is not really such a great idea?

Maybe some kind of personal valeting service is the solution then? Someone with a strong stomach and a soft bristle tooth-brush? I reckon I’d clean up pretty well with that idea.

In fact I’ll place an advert in the local paper right now:

“Wanted: scrubber.”

That ought to get the right kind of person interested…

Reasons Why Life Laundry Is Not Always A Good Thing

I know it is good to declutter. To have a clear out.

To void yourself of unwanted and unnecessary possessions. To push for the gush after an age of material constipation.

You feel lighter afterwards. Lithe. Virile even.

Life laundry can be a force for good.

But it can be a bad thing too. A process to be regretted at leisure.

When I moved out of the family home some years ago and into a bijou little flat in Warwick (it was a cupboard but it was my cupboard) I found that, by necessity, I had to shed some of my load. I had amassed enough goods and chattels to sink the Titanic without the aid of an iceberg.

I had to be harsh. The contents of Chatsworth House into a dumb waiter will not go.

I didn't think about it too much. That way the process wasn't as painful as it could have been. I did what I had to do. I pruned harshly. I cut things off without mercy. Disinherited myself of 50% of what was rightfully mine.

And it was fine.

I felt lighter, more lithe, more virile, etc, etc. Yes, I could breathe the free air once again. Life laundry was good.

But since then, over the intervening years, I have regularly come to regret my cold-hearted nonchalence. There are occasions when it makes me physically wince.

I will have a yen to grab a book that I'm sure I own. I will remember buying it. I will go to our many bookcases and search frutlessly. It is not there. I sold it to a secondhand book seller when I was offloading. It is now either out of print or costs a small fortune to buy back.

I will recall a childhood possession of great sentimental value. It is gone. I kept some but not all. Why do the ones still in my possession not mean as much to me as the ones that I threw away?

Worse still though is the ephemera.

I am currently converting a load of old recordings to digital format. Scripts I wrote and acted out with my sisters and friends. Stupid, adolescent stuff. Hopelessly puerile.

As fun and as great as it is to have these I found myself wishing that I'd just recorded day-to-day stuff. Conversations with my grandparents, etc. People whose voices are long lost to me due to Life's own life laundry.

And then I recalled that I did. I had a tape recorder with a built-in microphone and used to use up the spare bits of cassette at the end of making a mix-tape by just recording haphazard stuff via the microphone. There'd be a wealth of undocumented treasures there. Stuff I would no doubt not even remember.

But, of course, when I was lightening my load I threw out all my old mix-tapes. I had the records and could make them again if necessary. Why bother to keep hundreds of C90s? In my haste to get rid of them I didn't even stop to think about all those hidden ad hoc extras.

All gone now. No doubt amusing the tramps at the landfill.

Curse you, life laundry! If there was one thing I could get rid off now it would be you!

Skin

Nothing says “real person” more than bad habits.

See, I don’t subscribe to the view that people should be perfect or beyond all reproach. Stars and celebrities who project an air of excessive personal hygiene to the point of godliness are damned liars and fakers. I actually think such media projected sterility makes them less lovable. I mean, could you really love someone who never ever hooks a bit of earwax out of their inner ear with a fingernail?

Think carefully before you give that question a kneejerk response.

If we were all to be honest about it, picking one’s nose makes one more human, more fallible, more real and more accessible and, therefore, more deserving of other people’s love and more able to be loved.

To that end then, to court your adoration and earn the love I know that you are all yearning to give me, I have decided to share a few of my bad habits with you.

Nose and ear picking can be assumed as standard. We all do those. Some of us use cotton buds on sticks. Some of us fashion the corner of a hankie into a surgeon’s scoop. Some of us even buy those little mini Henry desktop Hoovers in an attempt to automate the process but we all – all of us – at some point in our lives introduce various hooking devices into the small recesses of our faces to remove redundant matter. I’m not going to bore you with the wherewithal of this or cut and paste data from my mucus log-book to give you an example of my longest bogey or most scallop like clump of earwax... just assume that I do it like the rest of you (though possibly with a little more class).

No, peculiar to me (not necessarily peculiar to you) my worst habit is probably picking my actual face.

Spots, mini scabs, tiny blemishes, dried and dead skin, anything that feels out of odds and disrupts the smooth texture of my skin when caressed with a sensitive fingertip is up for immediate removal in my book. Even better are those tiny scales of dead white skin that become trapped within the follicle forest of my beard or moustache. Because they have to be teased out through the barrier of possessive bristles that tend to want to keep them embedded where they are. I think that it’s this obstacle course of hair that makes the process all the more enjoyable. You can’t just have a quick scratch and flick and be done with it.

You have to dig. You have to wheedle. You have to be subtle and tactical. Especially if you want to get the skin out all in one piece replete with visible follicle holes.

I find I go into an almost meditative state when I engage in this activity. It’s, like, totally Zen. I bliss out. I enter an altered state of consciousness. It is deeply therapeutic. I suspect it is a shamanistic activity though Google doesn’t appear to want to back me up on that one at the moment.

Ha! What does Google know? Does Google have a face to pick?

No.

Sod Google.

So.

There we go.

I pick my face. I am totally deserving of your love and adoration and devotion. And if anybody doubts the veracity of that claim you can now prove it beyond all reason.

Now pucker up and kiss me like a good 'un.

Let’s Get A Handle On Hygiene

You know when news reports appear about food shortages or product shortages?

Well, I haven’t yet seen an occasion yet when there’s been a soap shortage. Or a shortage of wash basins. Or even, Goddammit, a shortage or paper towels. The food industry could go belly up tomorrow but we’d still be able to wash our hands.

So why is it that some of us don’t?

Why is it that some of us are just happy to smear our less attractive microbes over every communal surface possible in order to spread a little “germ love” to those we love and even those we don’t?

This is an age old complaint. I know it is. One day a fossilized stone slab will be found or possibly even a Mesolithic cave drawing that features some hang-dog caveman going about his toilet, not wiping his hands on a mammoth fur flannel and then being thrown out of the tribe for fingering the sabre tooth tiger steaks and scratching his back side with a flinthead axe.

And here we are in the 21st century and that hang-dog caveman is still around. The mammoth steaks and the flinthead axes might have disappeared but the not washing after using the toilet remains.

Countless times I have found myself ideologically trapped within a toilet facility. I have gone about my business. I have washed and dried and I’m ready to go. But a patron is ahead of me. A patron who has relieved himself of some intimate burden and then – for sheer want of any kind of civilizing influence – has vacated the premises without introducing his hands to soap and water.

Instead he has greased himself all over the door handle.

Which leaves me with a dilemma.

Do I try and grip the door handle at the point where I think he will have been least likely to touch it? This means trying to operate it only from its merest extremities – difficult when the door is heavy. Or do I wrap the handle in a paper towel and open it by way of a sheathing device? Or, even more dramatic, do I prop the door open with my foot and contort myself to the point of popping a hernia to reach the sink to wash my hands a second time and then barge my way out through the ajar door to gain my freedom and retain my germ free existence?

I don’t need this kind of conundrum when I want to use the bathroom! If I want more challenges in my life I’ll take up Sudoku.

Please, please, please, is it too much to ask that we all wash and go... after we’ve gone?

Logging Off

I don’t know your name. Or your address. But believe me I wish that I did.

I don’t know what your problem is but I’m guessing it is gastro related. Certainly it is a very personal beef.

I’m trying to divine your mindset. Figure out what makes you tick.

Perhaps you are homeless and have no access to basic facilities? The dark corner at the back of my place of work has, perhaps, special significance for you? The place where you had your first kiss / shag / spliff / al fresco bowel movement? Who knows? But something keeps drawing you back to the same spot night after night no matter how vigilant we are about shovelling your hefty calling cards into the river (note to the RSPCA: sorry about the dead swans).

Maybe you see yourself as a street artist? The Human Pencil perhaps? And each night your return to the same spot to try and achieve the impossible: sign your name with your own excrement? But I’m guessing you run out of lead before you get to the second letter. Bet you wish you’d been christened something short and pithy like Bob or Joe. I bet your real name is Alexander Gregorin Blenkinsop III and you curse your mother each time you squat down and try to work up a sharp point. Your prune intake must be phenomenal.

But at the end of the day, Mr Blenkinsop or whatever your real name is, I don’t really care. I don’t care about your background, your upbringing, your dietary requirements... I just want you to stop shitting up the side of my work building.

Get yourself a life. Get yourself a toilet. Get yourself a butt plug.

Just get yourself something.

And stop dumping all of your shit on me.

Why Bunk Beds And Vomit Do Not Mix

Cleaning up vomit must be one of the worst jobs a parent has to undertake within the normal gamut of parental experience.

I have literally just hit the anti bacterial hand wash to try and rid myself of that horrible tangy, catch-you-in-the-back-of-the-throat odour that seems to hang around you for hours afterwards after you have come into intimate contact with kiddius vomitus.

Our eldest has just chundered / technicolour yawned his way down every step of his bunk bed. Great coughing hiccups of bile, slimy chicken, chocolate, pork scratchings, lemon tart and lasagna (don't ask; it's been a long day). Not his usual diet I have to say but we took ourselves off to Warwick this morning to sample both its restaurants and its Saturday market. This stomach eruption should in no way be seen as a gourmet review. It is, I hope, just a reaction to the day's rather rich eating.

Because as a parent, when one of your offspring decides to blow chunks, you inevitably experience that gnawing, nagging fear that the household has been hit by a stomach bug that is going to work it's way around every single one of you and see you, the parent, mopping up yet more vomit before the night is through whilst vomiting huge spicy carroty-bits yourself.

However, the little 'un seems fine. Sleeping soundly, breathing calm. Which is no mean feat in a room that smells like Jimi Hendrix's pillow.

I, however, feel very queasy but I am putting that down to my recent close encounter with my son's expelled stomach lining that I have just poured down the toilet.

Bunk beds, for those of you that are thinking of investing in them for your kids, are not great. Yes, they save you space, but (and I am speaking from past experience here) when both occupants are ill you inevitably end up with a sick sandwich. The double decker chunder if you will. Clearing up ground vomit whilst being rained upon by air launched vomit is not a great milestone in any parent's career.

Today's encounter with hot-vom has been mild in comparison.

I have scraped off the carpet. Rubbed down the bunk bed ladder. Polished the child proof gate that divides my youngest from the upper level of the bunk bed kingdom. I have done my best to check over all nearby toys for collateral splashing and vegetable soup staining.

All seems as clean as I can make it.

The room still smells like a bulimic's handbag but both boys are now breathing peacefully and are sound asleep.

I'm fervently praying for a dry morning.

Put A Cork In It

Don’t get me wrong I like cats. I prefer dogs but I like cats. We had one all through my early childhood (a half feral moggy called Smokey) and another one through my teens (a fat black and white strop of a cat called Felix). I loved them to bits. Even when they clawed me.

(Which reminds me of that famous book: The Cat’s Revenge by Claude Balls.)

But I cannot abide the neighbourhood cats where I now live.

Not because they stalk the bird feeders that the wife and I keep constantly replenished at great cost to the weekly budget. Not because their territorial wars often wake me at night with the resultant caterwauling.

But because they shit on my lawn.

Actually on the lawn.

For some reason this strikes me as odd. Even a little bizarre. Because in my experience of cats – owning 2, cat-sitting for other people on occasion, etc – is that when they need the bathroom for a number 2 they tend to dig a hole and bury it. Nice clean animals, cats. They hide it all away. This is the belief system I have carried around with me since childhood.

Even my sister’s cats – both housebound because of living on an upper story – used to dig little holes in the cat litter tray. It is natural and instinctive behaviour for a cat. When they start pulling up the gravel with a forepaw you just know a cat turd is on its way.

So why are the neighbourhood cats spurning this evolutionary imperative and dropping their revolting little logs all over my lawn?

It’s not just an aesthetic problem, you see. My little boy loves playing out in the garden. As soon as the door is open he’s off, dressed or not, more often than not barefoot, trotting his merry way all over the lawn.

Barefoot. As is his right in his own back garden. Barefoot with little pellets of evil lying in wait in the grass.

Animal poo and little kiddies do not mix. There’s a story in the paper today of a little girl who may be blinded because she fell into some dog poo in a child’s play area. It’s heartbreaking.

It also makes me angry.

Now I know it’s a slightly different scenario – dogs have to cleaned up after by their owners and the same rule does not and cannot be applied to felines. The owner of the dog is responsible for the girl’s injury but the owner’s of the various cats in my street can’t really be held responsible for their cats pooing on my grass. Even though I’d quite happily kneecap the lot of them in a kangaroo court.

The question is: what can I do about it?

Some have suggested a sprinkling of curry powder or pepper spray onto the areas that the cats frequent. Fine but I don’t want a half naked little boy – or even a fully clothed one – rolling about in it either. So that’s no go.

The only other solution I can think of involves a cork, a shotgun and me pulling the trigger to fill Macavity’s muck cavity...

But is that, strictly speaking, legal?

Bread Crumbs

This week I have quaffed deep of the carafe of crapness. Supped long and hard on the soup-bowl of complete and utter work soddery. It is not an expression I use often on this blog but this week has been a shit sandwich. A shit sandwich of doorstep proportions.

There’s too much to go into here. Too much to discuss that would get me into trouble with my employers were I to share it openly – and you all know how I actively seek to avoid trouble of that nature. So let me satisfy external analysis by providing – for your delectation – one small vignette that not only began this week of work-based woe but also rather neatly sums it up.

Monday morning. We have just opened to the public. The foyer area is sparkling and smelling of pine fresh disinfectant. A contractor turns up to meet me. We exchange pleasantries and head back through the foyer to look at the faulty doors he has come to repair.

There is shit everywhere. Human shit. A trail of man-poo that slithers from the public toilets across the foyer to the library, across their cool blue carpet tiles, back out across the foyer towards the entrance doors and, yes, when I check, leads off across the parkland outside. Without any effort at all I bet I could follow the perpetrator all the way home.

The trail reminds me for some reason of the blood trail left after a seal has been clubbed and dragged back to a fur trading ship. Somebody has obviously clubbed a seal to death with an elephant sized turd.

I am gobsmacked. In fact I smack my gob and keep my hand there to prevent myself from inhaling the ripe aroma of freshly ejected effluvia that floats up from ground level like marsh gas.

In the space of a few brief seconds some scrote has – unfathomably – left the public toilets whilst soiling himself at a constant rate of one plop every third footfall.

Why? How?

How can you do this and not know you are doing it? ‘Cos I’m assuming it was an accident and not deliberate. Or am I wrong? Has the guy in question cut a hole in his trouser pockets like a POW in the Great Escape and carefully and surreptitiously dropped his load in the hope that the Nazi prison guards wouldn't notice what he was doing?

He’s failed. It sticks out a mile. And it smells. And – oh God – other customers are coming into the building and walking through it. As I watch, the wheel of a wheelchair carves a moist furrow in a particularly fetid looking dollop. There are now new shite trails beginning to spread out everywhere.

We get the cleaner. Bless her, she dons her marigolds with the stern expression of a vet about to remove a breach calf from the back end of a cow and gets to work. The clean-up operation has begun.

In the meantime a quick look of the CCTV cameras reveals a lost, confused, heavily bearded man wearing a woollen bobble hat despite the summer heat leaving the loos and wandering across to the library at the right time. Even with the dodgy quality of the CCTV footage you can clearly see that he’s not “all there” (indeed, a lot of him is spread across our floors). The phrase “care in the community” comes to mind. I.E. nobody cares and he’s been left to his own devices.

The cleaner reports that the loos are a bombsite (bum site?). Faeces and toilet paper in all the loos and all over the sinks. It’s going to be a big job (no pun intended).

*Sigh*

And that is how Monday began and – you know what? – the work week hasn’t got any better than that.

Like I said.

A shit sandwich.

Leamington Is Full Of The Strangest People, No. 2: Pooper-Scoop Pete

And so to continue with this sporadic series of Leamington vignettes (you can read the first one here if you are so minded) may I introduce you to Pooper-Scoop Pete?

I don’t know if Pete is his real name; I chose it purely for alliterative purposes and thought it sounded better than Turd Trowelling Trevor.

I encountered Pete last Friday as I made my way on foot to my employer’s HQ. Despite the day being so hot it would have melted Katie Price’s breast implants down to her ankles Pete was fully togged out in a tweed suit complete with matching waistcoat. And he was wearing a yellow shirt which I suspect (though cannot confirm) was buttoned right up to his Adam’s apple. He was sporting a full beard in a kind of way that said, “Yes, ruffian, even my face is properly dressed despite the excessive balminess of the weather”.

But strange though his appearance may have been it was not his sartorial qualities that attracted my eye... my eye that seeketh the strange and the paranormal in this bizarre worlde of Leamington upon the Spa.

No. It was the fact that he was very painstakingly picking up a large dog poo from the pavement.

And yet he most definitely did not have a dog. He was totally dog-less.

Worst of all his method of turd collecting was the old “stick your hand in a plastic bag and pick it up with your fingers and then turn the bag inside out” technique. Thus through the thin veneer of the plastic one can fully experience both the ambient temperature and the texture of the poo one is handling.

He had an old fashioned brown satchel slung over his right shoulder. I didn’t see him do it but I suspect the bagged up log was deposited within its leather innards.

The actions of this dedicated sausage removal expert have left me perturbed and confused. I mean why collect dog poo from the streets when you patently don’t have a dog in your possession?

Subsequent speculation on this conundrum has resulted in the following theories (do feel free to add your own):

1) he does indeed own a dog and said dog dropped a length earlier in the day but he found himself plastic bag-less and thus, being conscientious and mindful of his public duty, he returned at his next convenience to remove the offending article.

2) the government is funding some bizarre and secret research into the anti-personnel properties of canine faeces and Pete is collecting samples of the stuff to develop an anti aircraft missile that has true dirty bomb attributes.

3) Pete has a dog log fetish that has resulted in an entire backroom of his Edwardian terraced house (there are a lot of these in Leamington Spa) being given over to his personal “walnut whip” collection – all sorted and displayed according to size, bouquet, and canine breed (worked out using a clever algorithm that uses the diameter of the log to calculate the size of the canine rectum and therefore the most likely breed of the dog). This collection has been kept secret from his elderly mother who lives in a rocking chair in his loft and persists in calling Pete Norman.

Needles to say, I left Pete to his scatological endeavours and hastened on my way to Work’s HQ, praying that I would never have cause to see the insides of that buckled brown leather satchel that was visibly weighing down his right shoulder...

Leamington, eh? It’s full of the strangest people.

It’s MY Bloody Bin!

My workstation is a curious thing. When I clock-on on a Monday morning I greet it with a mixture of spleen, bleak acceptance and an odd proprietorial sense of comfort. It’s mine. I might not like the thought of another week at work doing tasks that nature never intended me for but while I’m here by God I’ll make sure my presence is writ large. Me and my desk are as one.

I own it.

Pens. Pencils. PC. Prittstick.

All mine. They may strictly speaking belong to my employer but they’ve been supplied for my use and my use alone and woe betide anyone who borrows my stapler and doesn’t bring it back. Blood has been shed for less.

This sense of ownership extends to my bin.

It’s mine. For my use. For my waste.

And few things irritate me more than arriving at work of a morning, feeling hound-dog miserable that another week will pass without me being employed as a script writer for the BBC, to find that someone – some lazy so-and-so with their own bin – has tossed their detritus into the hallowed plastic bag lined maw of my own personal trash receptacle.

My desk is right near the office door, see. It’s the last workstation people pass on their way to freedom.

So you can see how it happens. Someone scoffs a banana on their way to the door, or takes a last slug on a bottle of tequila, or maybe quaffs down a Müller Crunch Corner that they didn’t quite get round to at lunchtime and, with an arm action worthy of the Harlem Globe Trotters, the offending banana skin / Tequila bottle complete with maggot / yoghurt pot ends up in my bin.

Foodstuffs that I have not had the pleasure of consuming. Foodstuffs that have energized and nourished people other than me.

Their germs and their lipstick – maybe even a few stray nasal hairs – are still around the edges of their cast-off comestibles.

In my bin.

Great. Now the cleaner will think they are mine. Will think that I am the sort of person who discards banana skins in a way that leaves yellow stringy bits decorating the sides of my bin like a cheap Christmas decoration. That I am alcoholic. Worse. That I besmirch the holy temple of my body with a Müller Crunch Corner.

It’s the worst kind of identity theft there is (well, perhaps not as bad as having your credit cards cloned, houses bought in your name, debts run up on your accounts and your family killed by the identity thief and the blame put on you so you have to be investigated by Keeley Hawes – though I can see some positives in that. Note to self: amend that last sentence before the wife reads it).

It’s identity defamation. It’s identity libel.

Or identity... something.

Look. I don’t know what it is OK? It’s just annoying. And I’m fed up with it. And it’s Monday morning. And it’s MY bloody bin!

It's An OCD World

I can't remember the name of the product or the brand - and to be honest I wouldn't want to give it free advertizing space here anyway (they can pay for it like everybody else). It's a liquid soap dispenser. It dispenses soap to get your hands hygienically, biologically clean. It's no doubt the same stuff they use in chemical weapons laboratories. But this product is different.

You don't have to touch it, see. It senses the proximity of your hands and spits out a little bit of soap for your imminent ablutions. Because, as the advert helpfully points out, soap dispensers are incredibly filthy 'cos they're covered in all the crap and the germs from the last person who used them. So, hey, we've invented a product that never has to be touched by filthy human hands again - once you've installed it into your home, that is.

Yes. Home. Not a weapons lab. Not an abattoir. Not a pig farm (apologies to those of you who live on a pig farm).

Is it me or is this cleanliness thing getting out of hand (unlike the soap)?

In my early twenties - and this is a revelation that few of you will know about me (including my family) as the nature of this beast is secrecy - I suffered for about a year with OCD. I had an overwhelming, ridiculous, damaging need to wash my hands. I washed them so often and so hard that one day, whilst squeezing out the flannel, the soft tissue at the base of my thumb completely ripped through. I had washed out all the oils and goodness from my skin. It was at that point that I began to stop. It was one hell of a wake-up call.

It was tough. I did it without help. I changed job (which helped immensely - it eliminated most of my stress) and I just went cold turkey. Lived with being "dirty". It was horrible. The thing about OCD is, it makes you feel guilty if you don't wash. You could be spreading contamination, see.

To that end, at the height of my OCD, I used to wash the taps before and after I used them. It took ages. Because then I'd have to wash my hands again. And then the taps again. It seems comical now but was soul destroying at the time.

Now I daresay such a revolutionary product as a soap dispenser that you don't have to touch would have been great for me at the time. It would have saved me both time and effort in my futile attempts to render myself and my environment perfectly clean.

But looking at it now I am horrified. Because it is this type of product that fuels OCD mania in the first place. It validates all that an OCD sufferer fears: that the world is dirty; that they are dirty and they are spreading that dirt everywhere via all that they touch; it's their responsibility to keep it all clean.

A bit of dirt is fine. A bit of dirt is healthy. A bit of dirt is inevitable. Our bodies are biologically primed to deal with dirt and to use it to improve our immune systems. Living in a biologically clean bubble will weaken us and make us, ironically, more susceptible to infection from germs and bacteria.

There is no justification for this product outside of a hospital.

And it's a good job I have come full circle and feel that way with 2 wild boys running about the place. Their hands are dirty within seconds of being cleaned. They drop food on the floor, pick it up and eat it without a second thought. And I'm heartily glad for it.

It's healthy. It's sane.

A self dispensing soap pump is one gadget I will never ever have in my house - such things just make me feel dirty. And, insultingly, I suspect that is by design.

Behold The Great God, Bladder!

I’ve heard it told that the older you get the more you are at the mercy of your bladder. Your waterworks – either the need to pee or a distinct lack of pee action – start to rule your day, your thoughts and your, er, movements.

Now I am not at that stage yet myself. I’m all tickety-boo in the genitourinary stakes. I can withhold or blast forth ‘pon a whim and hit a gnat (should I be venting outside) at 50 paces. Unlike Severn Trent I am not plagued by burst water mains or seasons of drought that result in a full hosepipe ban.

But I am aware that for others, my seniors, taking a pee-pee is sometimes of a pressing nature.

Now this being said I still have a duty to lock up the toilets in the building where I work at 5pm. Even if the Library are open until 8. The reasons for this are twofold. 1) Once the café is shut (at 5pm) we no longer have a legal requirement to keep the toilets open to the public. We used to but 2) when the toilets were previously left open on our late night openings there were invariably trashed, smashed, vandalized, violated by horse-sized poos, spattered with blood / broken glass / toilet paper, used by druggies to smoke, shoot, imbibe, photosynthesize, osmose and partake of rum chemical cocktails or used by amorous couples with no sense of romance whatsoever to grind, spoon, get jiggy, have-it-off, bonk, shag, have-a-quickie, and otherwise fill their boots with each other’s wanton flesh in the ammonia stained cubicles that have made our building famous.

Our poor loos were, in short, being used in a manner that they were never intended to be used for. So we started closing them at 5pm. We’ve been doing this now for nearly 4 years. And there are signs everywhere informing people of the impending 5pm loo embargo. It’s not like we’re shutting the door on someone’s colostomy bag without prior warning.

So it was with distinct displeasure that while I was performing my duties last week I got a verbal mauling from some old geezer wanting to “point Percy at porcelain”. “I’m sorry,” I told him, keys jangling earnestly in my hand, “but the toilets are closed at 5.” I even pointed at the sign on the wall to prove that I was not making it up and nor was it anything personal.

The man growled at me. Growled. Well, I’m assuming it was a growl and not the sound of his bladder bursting. “God,” he said. “I wish I had a job where I could close up at 5.” And with that he stormed off before I could even attempt to apologize for his lack of convenience or point him in the direction of some other facilities not 2 minutes walk away.

I must admit my first thought was: you old cantankerous git. Finish at 5? Finish at 5? I finish at 5.15, ahem. But that’s not the point. I am on the emergency call-out list and frequently get called back to the building to deal with alarm problems in the evening, late at night and the small wee (ha!) hours of the morning. So in a sense I never finish at 5 because I’m never bloody well off duty. Hence I like to make my escape as quick as I can at close of business each day and get home to see my wife and kids while I can and not be hovering around the toilets until 5.30pm or later extending the toilet service to bladder stragglers.

Now on occasion when someone is nice to me or is pregnant or is under the age of 5 and with a desperate parent in tow I will sometimes allow post-5pm peeing. But courtesy and politeness are an essential ingredient to this transaction. Rudeness gets you nowt. No please, no pees.

So take a lesson from this folks; should you ever come to Leamington Spa and visit the building wherein I work, the only p you’ll ever be required to part with when you want to spend a penny is a please. I don’t care how angry or swollen your bladder is. I don’t care what plagues it threatens to send forth from your nether regions – locusts, frogs or fiery ammonia – your bladder is not my god and I shall never ever worship it.

Just to make it even more clear: remember, I’m the one holding the keys to the toilets.

Hail to the King, baby.

It’s A Dirty War

Is street litter alive, do you think? Does it possess some kind of sub-intelligence that allows it to migrate minutely across pavements and up kerbstones according to the rules of some kind of inscrutable herd instinct?

I ask this because my front garden seems to attract litter like Heather Mills attracts woodworm (but repels Beatles – ha ha). Every day a new piece of detritus appears from out of the ether – like it’s apported there from another dimension. Sweet wrappers, crisp packets (usually full of rain water) and the ubiquitous and therefore unconditionally hateful McDonald’s milkshake carton.

I can only surmise that the architecture of my street creates some weird kind of wind vortex that sucks and swirls all the litter from the immediate vicinity into a little freight train of trash that inevitably finds its way to my front door step.

It sounds too unfeasible to be true, doesn’t it? But the alternative would be to suggest that passersby are deliberately hoofing the packaging from their consumables over my hedge and onto my front lawn on a regular basis.

Now I’m not so paranoid as to suggest a deliberate campaign of dirty warfare here but the fact we’re on the route home from the local pub probably has a bearing on what is occurring and, yes, I know worse things happen at sea and all that...

...but it annoys the living bejasus out of me. Mostly because the local authority has, in its infinite wisdom, installed litter bins every 50 yards along most of Leamington’s streets. No matter where you are in Leamington Spa you are never too far away from a litter bin. They punctuate every pavement of my home town like a 3D form of Sanskrit.

And yet the streets are still awash with crap, cast-offs and the crud of various social effluvia.

The most recent offense that has really got my goat was finding one of those horrid orange polystyrene food cartoons wedged into my hedge like the poor thing was an aga. The hedge is quite dense. It takes some doing to wedge anything into it, I can tell you. In fact we occasionally find birds spitted on the ends of twigs like ready-made kebabs. To shove a polystyrene container in there, elbow-deep, took a good deal of deliberate effort. Surely it would have been far easier to walk another 10 yards or so and find the ever open-mouth of a friendly litter bin? Why dump your guff on someone else’s parade?

Clearly there are too many people around who just do not care enough about their environment and that makes me quite depressed. Why is it that we humans constantly deface the world around us with such belligerent nonchalance? Have we really progressed no further than dogs and cats who mark out their territory with the waste of their own bodies? Here, see that chip wrapper over there? Well, that’s mine that is and so’s the street that goes along with it...!

Harrumph.

Well, see that machine gun turret behind that hedge over there? That’s mine, that is, and so is everything that falls in range of the bullets. So find an effing bin next time!

Fair Or Foul?

I got excited at work last week.

This singularly rare occurrence was caused by Kirstie Allsopp.

It seems that my employers were taking part in the new Keep Britain Tidy campaign that was about to be fired up and were asking for volunteers to take part in a special lunch time litter pick. How was Kirstie involved? Well, this new national campaign was being figure-headed by the particularly luscious Kirstie who I mistakenly thought was going to be personally throwing her lust-inducing weight behind the endeavour.

I was all prepared to wear rubber gloves and rubber boots (in fact rubber everything), give up my lunch break and get stuck in to the man made mountains of mess that regularly besmirch my home town of Leamington Spa. Not only was I prepared to invest in my own litter picker (which I’d be quite prepared to let Kirstie handle) but I was actually plotting to shovel extra detritus around the district’s footpaths and byways just so I could present my bulging sacks to Kirstie at the end of the event to show her what a tip-top litter picker-upper I really am.

I just know she’d have been impressed and would have whisked me off for a mochaccino somewhere to say a private thank you.

I had it all planned.

Sadly, once I tore my eyes from her picture and actually read the article on my work’s intranet properly it transpired that Kirstie would not be present at the actual Leamington Spa event. Instead she’d be at the official launch in London. What? Get your bleeding priorities right, Kirstie!

It seems all we’d get in L Spa was my big boss in his marigolds.

Not exactly a crowd puller. Needless to say I spurned the litter pick and moodily ate my sandwiches in the park and begrudgingly threw my crisp packet into the bin afterwards.

This is the story of my life. To not exactly brush fame as to see it smeared across someone else about 100 miles away.

Not that we don’t get to meet famous people through special events organized by my employers...

Only last month I could have taken part in an anti dog fouling campaign and met (not necessarily shaken hands with) Ricky Tomlinson who was taking a personal interest in the campaign and actually come down to Leamington Spa to throw his lust-repelling weight behind the launch.

Now I’m not knocking this campaign at all. Speaking as someone whose shoe soles seem to be permanent turd magnets I wholeheartedly approve of any endeavour to remove dog logs from our streets.

But Ricky Tomlinson? Posing next to a dog turd bin? It didn’t exactly get the juices of my enthusiasm flowing.

Kirstie, you’ve broken my heart.

P.S. Would anyone like to purchase a second hand litter picker? Unused. Clean. Grip handle squeezed only once. Going cheap.

Some People And Me

Three items on the bugbear list this morning.

First off – a flagrant disregard for child safety.

I took the boys into school / nursery this morning as Karen is in Birmingham on an accountancy training course. On the way we passed one of Tom’s nursery mates being walked to school by her dad. Well, I’m assuming it was her dad and not her uncle. Whoever he was he obviously wished he was doing something else. There were frequent exhortations to “come on” and “hurry up”.

Bear in mind his ward is a wide-eyed 2 year old.

Now Tom loves walking. He finds it a great delight and no doubt feels very grown up doing it. Unfortunately, at just under 2 he just does not understand how important it is to hold mummy or daddy’s hand when busy roads are nearby. So he gets strapped into the pushchair. He’s fine with this thankfully. It’s still fun to be out and about even without the ability to perambulate freely. But even if he complained I’m afraid he’d still be stuck in the pushchair regardless.

I’d rather have him crying and safe than laughing one minute and forever silent the next.

So it was with horror that I watched this poor girl almost run out into the road when a car was coming and then get hollered back onto the pavement at the last minute.

For God sake man keep a grip of your child!

This would be bad enough in isolation but my wife witnessed a similar incident with the same family a few afternoons ago when she picked Tom up from nursery. Again the kid ran out into the road and was only hauled in at the last moment. The poor motorist who was almost involved looked ashen as they drove away.

It’s an accident just waiting to happen.

What is wrong with some people?

Secondly – cleanliness.

Due to blocked drains I’ve been flush testing all the toilets in the building this morning. As I was doing this someone came into the toilets after me. Now, I don’t know why, but I instinctively stood still and kept quiet and out of sight in the cubicle. I instinctively became furtive. Bizarre when I wasn’t even doing anything that involved the lesser-loved bodily functions. But there you go. Maybe I was a pervert in another life? Please keep your responses to this to yourself.

Now I know for a fact that, due to the location of these toilets, they are mostly used by the catering staff.

So imagine my disgust when I heard the urinal being used and then the “urinee” head straight back out without even a cursory swill under the taps.

This is someone who literally has his fingers in every pie going. Not to mention casseroles and stews. And a whole menagerie of sandwiches. On a daily basis.

How can you do that? How can you “point Percy at porcelain” and then not even wave your dannies under a bit of running water?

Folks, there’s a lot to be said for preparing your own packed lunch every day.

Lastly – my own self deprecation.

The other night I assisted some work colleagues who were having difficulty alarming their department at the end of the working day.

When such difficulties arise and seem to be insurmountable I always recommend that staff ring the local CCTV guys and ask them to keep an especial eye on the building. It’s a little extra security measure that probably acts as nothing more than a mental placebo.

I was asked if I had the number to hand.

I did. It was in my head instantly.

My head is full of useful numbers and codes and passwords. I make no effort to memorize them. They’re just there. They stick. It’s a natural facility. When I used to work at British Telecom I found I could give out a lot of the numbers to people without referring to the computer records at all. I had them off by heart. Only the frequently asked for ones I hasten to add. I’m not one of these people that make a living (or a living death) out of memorizing phone books.

But instead of just giving out the number I made a pretence of thinking hard about it. Pretending to strain as I fired up the old memory engine. Why did I do that?

It’s like I was embarrassed to have the necessary knowledge so ready to hand. Was I afraid of appearing sad and nerdy as opposed to just damned efficient?

Why hide my light under a bushel?

Some people, eh?

Cleansing

Karen and I are off for the week enjoying another money saving Staycation holiday. Rather than just laze about (which, let’s face it, is what any normal person would do) we’ve elected to give the house something of a cleaning blitz.

Shampoo the carpets. De-web and de-mould the windowsills. That kind of thing.

It’s a big job and trying to do it with 2 very active children makes it harder still. After all a 2 year old does not appreciate the dictat of not walking on a freshly shampood carpet for a couple of hours until it is dry. And the 8 year old doesn’t give a damn; making a rendezvous with his PlayStation is of a much higher priority.

It is stressful, all this “deep pore” cleaning. And I can now appreciate why my mother used to get so irrate with me and my two sisters on “hoover days” during the summer holidays.

My mother would, without fail, hoover the house twice a week. Mondays would be a “light” day – sitting room and hall only. But Fridays would be the big “all over” day. Upstairs and downstairs. The whole Shebang.

There is something about adults performing cleaning chores that, I swear, just makes kids behaviourally uncooperative. We’d inevitably play up and earn the short, quick arm of my mother’s temper. If we were particularly bad a phone call to my Nan would be in order and she’d speak to us on the phone. Never to tell us off. I don’t think I ever saw or heard my Nan angry but the shame of knowing my Nan felt the slightest disappointment in us was usually enough to bring us all back into line.

God, but I wish she was still alive and on the other end of the phone today.

With the carpets shampood yesterday we all elected to go outside for the afternoon. For the little one this is actually a bonus. He loves being outside in the garden. Rain or snow he loves it. The 8 year old, however, has more of an ambivalent attitude. The garden is great in theory but he’d much rather be inside plugged into his PlayStation or his Nintendo DS.

Except he managed to break the latter in a horrendous fit of temper on Sunday evening.

Every Sunday he has but one chore to perform:

Clean his room.

And, my God, is it a performance. A 2 hour job (at the most) usually ends up taking over the whole day and the whole house. Karen and I have to put more energy into getting him to do it than the job itself would actually take if we were to do it ourselves. But there is a principal at stake here so we persist.

There will be tantrums. There will be wailing. There will be gnashing of teeth. There will be shouting. There will be playing with his toys rather than just tidying them away. There will be miniscule attempts at cleaning and then a million “tea breaks” to recover. And then there will be naggings to get on with the job and get it finished and then the whole cycle will start all over again.

Usually the threat of “no gaming” until the room is tidy ensures the job is eventually completed. With the absence of my Nan on the end of the phone it is the only and best alternative.

This Sunday, however, was different. This Sunday he was told he’d be banned from the DS unless he tidied his room. He said he’d done it and promptly started playing. When we checked we found that the sneaky little so-and-so had merely covered the mess up with his duvet. So gaming was duly banned.

This was when the temper kicked in. And I mean Temper. We’re talking Zeus hurling flaming thunderbolts. We’re talking The Incredible Hulk throwing Chieftain tanks into massive military fuel dumps. Two large tubs of Lego got overturned – 1000+ pieces all over the floor. And then the DS got thrown across the room. £120 quid’s worth of kit broken in a fit of pique.

Karen and I were not impressed. My Nan would have been speechless.

We cannot afford to replace such equipment willy-nilly. So the boy is now Nintendo-less.

The boy of course was distraught. And showed it by having an even bigger tantrum. And then realizing he’d be spending the next 24 hours picking up ALL the Lego from his room before he’d be allowed the ameliorative powers of the PlayStation had another even bigger tantrum.

This was Sunday. And Monday. And part of Tuesday.

The Lego wasn’t completely tidied away until yesterday afternoon after 2 days of sheer hell. Tantrums, complaints, shouts and more attempts at merely concealing the mess rather than actually cleaning it properly.

Karen and I are both exhausted.

Apparently the 8 year old is only possibly on the “borderline of the Aspergers spectrum” according to our local GP.

Christ. I pity those parents with kids who have the full blown version.

The carpet of my mind now needs a deep clean. My mind needs a shampoo.

A good scrub all over please someone.

The Mechanics Of Profanity

I perform a daily external patrol around my place of work pretty much as soon as I arrive on site each morning, armed not with a telescopic baton, pepper spray or a taser but with a bin bag and the keys to the bin store.

You see, I’m not on the lookout for armed blaggers or tooled up psychopaths but for litter louts and damned defacers. Or rather, I’m on the lookout for their multifarious droppings.

This is just one of the many uplifting and status elevating jobs that I perform regularly for my employers.

On a good morning my rounds will net nothing more than a couple of empty cans of Special Brew and an empty cigarette packet (usually Marlboro). Though on occasion these items are augmented inextricably by the presence of a pair of ladies shoes, the cellophane wrapping from an Asda T-shirt (which will be missing – presumably on the purchaser’s / shoplifter’s back) and an odd collection of serviettes still folded up into neat little squares.

Plainly the drunks and tramps around the Leamington Spa area have standards. Not necessarily high standards but standards none the less.

On a bad morning I will encounter what is known in the trade as “a man turd”.

Now, this is not to be confused with a dog turd.

A dog turd is bad enough. I don’t need to describe one to you because you’ve all seen one / walked through one. They’re disgusting and unwelcome in the extreme but have one small positive; one saving grace. The odour of a dog turd (unless stepped into and thus reactivated) is relatively short-lived. A quick slide action with a shovel and they can quite successfully be scraped up off the ground and catapulted into nearby undergrowth without too much post-contact shovel cleaning required. If you’re really lucky the turd will already have turned quite crusty and will barely have left a mark on your spade of choice. Job done (no pun intended, etc).

None of this is ever true of a man turd.

Now, you can tell a man turd by the size and smell.

They smell bad.

And they smell bad forever.

So bad in fact that even a passing hyena would gag.

And they take a hell of a long time to go crusty. In fact they retain a Christmas cake moistness of such magnitude that they may one day be identified as reliable sources of H2O in a post atomic holocaust world.

If you’re lucky the “bricklayer” will possess a healthy digestive system and will deposit a single neat sausage that can be scraped up quite cleanly and lobbed somewhere out of sight and out of mind. If you’re unlucky, however, the owner will have the digestive system of a cat on high strength worming tablets and will leave matter that can be variously described as “a broken muffin”, “a Spanish omelette” or, worst of all, “a walnut whip”.

And such matter will defy any and every attempt at efficient shovelling. In fact using a shovel is just a big no-no. You’ll just get the offending matter spread over a wider surface area and the shovel itself will be transformed into a chemical weapon so effective it would make a muck-spreader vomit.

What is needed is an industrial strength hose and a bio-suit.

I was faced with one of these this morning.

Now, I’ve become something of a stoic when confronted with these still-warm examples of ethno-botany but a couple of niggling questions always buzz around the back of my head (like the flies) every time I encounter one.

The mechanics of producing such an offering... I mean, how exactly does someone go about it?

The pulling down (or up) of clothing and the squatting down I can just about envision (though try not to)... but... cleaning yourself up afterwards...? What happens there, eh?

Do these people come pre-prepared with toilet paper or freshly bought copies of The Big Issue? If they do this suggests something premeditated about their whole activity and therefore a sickness of the mind.

Or are such droppings evidence of people genuinely caught short... a case of the poo-train is coming and the brakes they ain’t a-working?

What happens then? Surely you don’t just pull up your kecks and walk daintily home, ignoring the uncomfortable localized heat and the feeling of greasy skid marks working themselves deeper into the gusset of your Y-fronts?

You must surely make some attempt to clean yourself up, to scrape off the worst?

But with what or on what?

Nearby foliage? The wall of a building? The pavement itself?

A sleeping tramp?

My mind boggles.

Answers on a piece of toilet paper to the usual address please...

Too Cute For Words (But I’m Gonna Try)

+++ WARNING +++ PARENTING POST +++ WARNING +++

Tom was sick the other morning. Not a sign of illness of bad food, thank God, just a cough that dug a little too deep. A cough with follow through, if you like.

This occasioned not only a change of bed sheets and jim-jams but also necessitated a ride in the washing machine for “Teddy” and “Snow Bear”, Tom’s utterly devoted sleeping companions.

Now, Tom already loves the washing machine and likes nothing better than to help me load it up ready for a wash. However, given that Tom’s bed mates were going to be subjected to the wash and spin cycle we decided it might be a little traumatic for Tom to condemn his friends to such an ordeal and so snuck the toys in while he was preoccupied with CBeebies.

There was no fooling Tom. As soon as the washing machine kicked into life Tom rushed over to it and stared into its portal window with a look of consternation. There, deep within its foamy innards, Teddy and Snow Bear could be seen sloshing about barely (sorry!) keeping their heads above the torrential suds.

Tom’s hand went to his mouth. His other hand pointed to the washing machine and a loud, sympathetic “aaah” could be heard.

Tom checked on their progress regularly throughout the morning. As soon as the washing machine reached its conclusion and became silent and still Tom was canny enough to wait for the door to unlock itself before he burst into action. Quick as a Flash (sorry again!) he opened up the door and fished his bedraggled friends out.

They were each given a big hug and a kiss and were then carried lovingly to the sofa where they were lain down side by side on the cushions. Tom put his fingers to his lips and told them “shhh”; a clear indication that he felt that a little sleep was all they needed to put their soapy ordeal well behind them.

Altogether now: aah!

I would now like to start a campaign to change the current Oxford Dictionary definition of “cute” to the post above. All Blogger support appreciated.

Robotic Bin Men

According to a News24 news item this morning boffins in Italy have developed a robotic rubbish collector.

Customers can send a text message to the robot when they leave out their bin bags and then he/she/it will happily trundle along, scoop up their bin bags and take them to the appropriate trash sorting centre. It sounds great. Bin men on demand. No more rubbish lying around rotting for days on end while we wait for the bin men to finally get round to performing their weekly pick up. One text and you get instant service.

Presumably as many times a day as you need it.

Of course for it to work in the UK there are certain modifications that would have to be made and certain social problems that would have to be overcome.

You just know that the poor little robot would end up mercilessly tagged with graffiti as it went about its business or, worst case scenario, hoofed into the nearest river or dropped off a railway bridge to be neatly (trash) compacted by the 9.25 to Birmingham Moor Street.

So security for the Brit version would have to be beefed up. Armour of some kind. Anti tamper mechanisms. Anti graffiti paint. Smoke canisters and rubber bullets fired out of its electronic anus. A direct line to the ASBO department of the local constabulary. Possibly a random selection of Gene Hunt quotes broadcast through an on-board amplifier to deter potential attackers.

“You’re making as much progress as a spastic in a magnet factory...”

"You look as nervous as a very small nun at a penguin shoot...”

"You so much as belch out of line and I'll have your scrotum on a barbed wire plate..."

That sort of thing.

As for modifying its behaviour to fit in with British bin man culture, this should be easy enough to do.

It would need to be reprogrammed to be as untidy as possible – to spill litter everywhere and not bother to return your bin properly. Instead it could dump your bin in another street entirely so you can play “hunt the bin” for a couple of hours to get it back.

It would have to sing as loudly as possible in a voice so atonal it makes Piers Morgan sound like Frank Sinatra. Something by Brittany Spears. Only with alternative lyrics – rhymes that would make a rugby player blush. And all songs must be sung between 8.30 and 9.00 in the morning so every school kid in the land can receive a true education in uncouthness and vulgarity.

Finally of course the bin bot must be programmed to sift through your rubbish in search of old porno mags and rogue copies of The Sunday Sport that it can wave about in the street and call to its robotic colleagues about.

“Blimey, look at the trash compactor on ‘er...”

“Cor, I wouldn’t mind land-filling that one...”

Etc. Etc.

Yeah. Then it would fit right in. Perfect integration. Nobody would even notice any difference.

See, I should have been a scientist, me.