Dirty Poles

In an ideal world this post would be about my misadventures in a lap dancing club.

Instead it is about a misadventure with a broken washing machine. Misadventure. That makes it sound like the final verdict is a cop out from an inconclusive police investigation when in fact the verdict is far from inconclusive. It was, ladies and gentlemen, theft pure and simple.

Yes, the washing machine - condemned to death due to a clapped out motor - had been left in my front garden in full view of the street. Yes, my intention was to offload it onto the first rag and bone man that blew his trumpet my way. Yes, I had no intention of making any money from the transaction. I affirm all of the above.

But I put it to you that, lying in situ on my front lawn as it was, and all other intentions aside, that washing machine was still my property and legally mine. To remove it without my permission was theft plain and simple.

So. The local rag and bone man finally appears on his appointed day and I dash outside to hail him over. He grinds his flatbed truck to a halt, leaps out with the look of a martyr doing me a favour and finds me scratching my head at the huge washing machine shaped hole that has suddenly appeared in the reality that surrounds us.

It was literally there the last time I looked and now suddenly it wasn't.

Some bugger had half-inched it in the night. Probably while Karen and I had taken the car off the drive and gone into town to see Star Trek.

Unbelievable. Do these people offer a refuse collection service as well?

I had to apologize for wasting Mr Rag & Bone Man's time. He gave a pained shrug like he was used to this sort of thing and uttered the words, "probably them dirty Poles" before driving off in a squeal of copper piping and freshly fenced drain covers.

Great. Theft and casual, lazy racism all in one day.

To be honest, it's possible he wasn't slagging off all Poles in one foul breath but merely slighting the rival gang of Polish rag and bone men who also ply their trade along our street and, as he sees it, steal his business.

As it was I know for a fact that the washing machine was taken late in the evening when no rag and bone man would even think about stirring from the pub no matter how much free "any any old iron" was waiting to be had. Somebody else had nicked it, ethnic extraction as yet unknown.

And I am mightily pissed off about it but I find all avenues of recompense currently closed to me. The thing was broken and I wanted rid of it. So what does it matter?

It matters because whoever took it had made huge assumptions about the situation. That washing machine could have been specifically promised to someone. That machine could have been in full working order and only outside temporarily while we overhauled the kitchen. That washing machine could have been a novelty dog house.

They didn't ask to find out. They just took it. If they'd knocked on my door and asked me if they could take it I would probably have said yes and good riddance to it. But they didn't even pay me that smallest of respects.

It is the arrogant assumption that they had the right to take it without any kind of legal impediment that really grates with me.

An Englishman's castle is no longer sacred.

These days, unless you can nail it down, the natives are likely to steal the moat.

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!

You Lying Cheating Old Bag

I’m not a hard hearted uncharitable person but whenever these things get posted through my letterbox I feel a certain uprising of bile. An upsurge of suspicion and impatience. And then I invariably scoop them up and put them straight into the rubbish bin. I’ve done it for years. I don’t think I have ever filled one up and left it outside for collection.

I am, of course, talking about charity bags.

Pretty much every week some chancer who plainly can’t take a hint insists on shoving one of these tacky plastic bags through my door. They want old clothes, shoes, fetish gear, gimp masks, post amnesty assault rifles, bedsteads and Anderson Shelter manuals – basically anything; anything at all that you don’t want anymore and that you would normally Freebay onto a deserving person; anything that they can then sell on the black market in Europe and make quite a nice tidy sum for themselves thank you very much.

Because this is the disheartening truth.

Most of these so called charity bags collections are not done to alleviate the suffering of the poor but are done to inflate the bank accounts of a few dodgy individuals who believe that charity starts and ends at home. Preferably yours.

Some of the less dodgy ones do send some of the money on to the charities they claim to support but we are talking the tiniest percentage here; the smallest amount they can skim off the top. According to recent research by the British Heart Foundation we are talking as little as 5%.

And this is sad and it is wrong. I mean here I am celebrating my cynicism because it has saved me from being duped but actually that’s an appalling indictment of society. People organize a charity collection and my first reaction is to say, “yeah right, as if” and bin the collecting bag.

The people that truly lose out are, as always, the poor and the needy.

But it is the likes of you and me who are also being cheated. We’re cheated when we donate stuff and imagine that it will be going to a good home; that it will help make someone’s life a little better. That we are doing a good and useful thing. It leaves a very nasty taste in the mouth. Especially when we are all tightening out belts at the moment and these ‘charity collectors’ are making a very nice tidy living out of our cast-offs.

Karen and I have never responded to cold callers – not to sellers and not to charity workers. Not ever. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes it feels mean. But our ethos has always been when we give to charity we will choose the charity for ourselves and organize the nature of the donation ourselves. It is the only way to be sure that the donation is going to the right people and not into the pockets of some muck-grubbing scheister.

So there you have it. Proof, if any were needed, that the world is as screwy as it’s ever going to get: charity and cynicism go hand-in-hand like love and marriage.

Tough love: it’s the only way.

Do give generously.

Salt And Vinegar

When you’re watching a Western and you see all those dust balls rolling across the main street just before the main gunfight kicks off, have you ever wondered where they all end up?

No? Well, they end up in my street.

Along with yellow foam-styrene chip cartons, McDonald’s milkshake containers and old copies of The Sport (which could very well become museum items over the coming years).

I tell you this so that you don’t think my street is so clean it looks like something out of Trumpton. (How come Mrs Honeywell’s yapping dogs never foul the pavement, eh? Where are her pooper-scoop and her little plastic shit bag?)

My street is just a messy street. The town planners, when laying out the residential housing grid in the 1950’s, inadvertently created a trash vortex that pulls in rubbish from miles away and dumps it in the gap between my hedge and next door’s garden wall.

Or at least this is what I thought. This is has been my long held belief for years.

But I was finally disabused of this belief last Friday.

Leaving my house I chanced to look across the road where I witnessed a man in his thirties finishing a packet of crisps. Now, given there are public bins not 100 yards away, you’d expect him to screw up the packet and dispose of it responsibly. Well, you would if you were an idealistic fool who think that people actually care about their immediate environment. If, like me, you have a cynical bent you wouldn’t be too surprised to see him screw up the packet and lob it onto the pavement. ‘Cos that’s just how the majority of people behave these days. Like scum.

But no. It seems there was a third option.

This surprisingly well dressed lout carefully flattened out his crisp packet and took considerable pains to slide it between the slats of a neighbour’s fence.

I couldn’t believe it.

I mean, it’s bad enough to throw your litter to the four winds – people do it unthinkingly all the time. But what kind of inconsiderate, thoughtless, selfish prick expends time and energy shoving his rubbish into and onto the property of someone he doesn’t know?

I know, I know. Bigger things are happening elsewhere. This is a small issue.

But I can’t help but think it is somehow representational. There seem to be more and more people around these days who go out of their way to cause problems for others. Not just causing problems accidentally for other people, but deliberately doing it. Planning it. Devising ways to do it. Doing it even when doing it is not even the easiest option.

And what did I do? Nothing. I gave him a hard stare, Paddington Bear style, enough to make him turn around and face me under the iron disapprobation of my censure. But like Paddington I merely felt like I was a lone 3D character in a world of animated 2-dimensional cut-outs, i.e. I was the odd one out in this scenario.

The odd one out for caring and being pissed off at what this guy had done.

I did consider removing the crisp packet and following this guy home and shoving the offending article somewhere prominent on his own property but, I’ll be honest, even though Brian Turner has revamped the menus at the local A&E I am not overly fond of hospital food.

And besides. Why expend all that energy? A good gust of wind and that damned crisp packet will end up behind my front hedge anyway. The world is still the world.

Nothing has really changed.

*Sigh*

I never did like Status Quo.

Leamington Is Full Of The Strangest People, No. 3: Tin Can Andy

And so may I present what is probably going to be the third in a three part series about some of the strange people in Leamington Spa that you may meet if, like me, you actually lived here.

For those of you that have missed the first two (what were you doing? Leading a life?) Number 1, Bob The Shopkeeper is here and no.2, Pooper-Scoop Pete is here.

Today though we are going to speculate on the strange existence of Tin Can Andy.

Like most towns across the UK our household waste collection service is divided over a 2 week period. One week it will be the pre-sorted, pre-flattened, pre-washed recyclable stuff. The next week it will be the uneaten food stuffs, body parts, landfill fodder and stuff the charity shops wouldn’t touch with a barge pole.

On the recycling waste weeks, so early in the morning that the birds are still brushing their teeth and gargling with Listerine, you can hear the squee-squee-squee of Tin Can Andy’s shopping trolley. Well. When I say Andy’s shopping trolley I really mean Asda’s shopping trolley.

As I’m so paranoid about having my bin nicked I don’t put my recycling boxes out until the very morning of the collection. I’m usually up pretty early anyway as I have kids and anyone who has kids knows that 6.0am is a lie-in.

It is during this early morning chore that, if I am lucky, like spying a red deer emerging from the mist, I sometimes spot Tin Can Andy moving surreptitiously amongst the red boxes and bags that his community has placed outside their doorsteps ready for the waste disposal team to empty.

Tin Can Andy you see likes to rummage around other people’s recycling waste and re-appropriate... you’ve guessed it... all the tin cans. By the time I see him he must be about half way through his “round” as his trolley is usually piled up already with his ill-gotten aluminium gains.

Now I confess I don’t know what to make of Tin Can Andy. Part of me feels an undeniable sense of indignation. Technically these cans are not his property. They belong to the people who have left them out in good faith for the council bin men. Technically what he is doing is theft. Isn’t it?

But then the other half of me thinks, what the hell. It’s only junk. Who cares?

Presumably – though this is yet to be confirmed – there is money to be made selling old tin cans to scrap metal merchants? Certainly given the number of drain covers that have been stolen from the Warwickshire area over the summer people are crying out for metal, whether it is “scrap” or not. But would the money you’d get from a tin can really make the sheer effort involved in acquiring it worthwhile?

So my other theory is that Tin Can Andy is building something out of the tin cans. He is, in fact an alien. One of those multi-morphing alien creatures from John Carpenter’s The Thing. And out in his backgarden, in a clumsily dug cavity under his B&Q shed, there is an underground tunnel leading to a half built spaceship. Once Andy has acquired enough cans of baked beans he’s buggering off home again to Alpha Centauri or Clacton, one of the two.

To be honest I couldn’t care less.

As long as I don’t have to see his upside down head scampering across my lawn on giant spider’s legs I’ll be more than happy. Though to be fair, he does keep the occurrences of cat poo invasion down to a minimum...

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!

Leamington Peace Festival: A Load Of Old Cock

You’d think with me working in the building that is situated right next to where Leamington’s Peace Festival is annually held I’d be a Peace Festival veteran. That I must surely go to it every year. That I must positively sweat scented joss sticks and have a Matrix style overcoat made entirely from hand-woven friendship bracelets.

You’d think that with the weather good for once plus the possibility of meeting a fellow blogger I’d make more of an effort to go this year.

Negative on all counts (sorry, Laura).

What with the eldest boy’s 9th birthday, Father’s Day and a top secret meeting at work that I had to take the minutes for but can’t talk about here my Peace Festival weekend was effectively kiboshed.

However, I must confess that even if all of the above hadn’t been hitting the fan this weekend it would have taken a wild horse indeed to get me to the Peace Festival (though I daresay a combination of my wife who is rather partial to the Peace Festival and the opportunity for a blogger meet on my very own doorstep may have dragged me there kicking and screaming. Not – and do quote me on this – that either my wife or Laura are horses).

So what is it that I don’t like about the Peace Festival?

a) Although I was never one of the cool people in my youth I was also never quite alternative enough to be alternative. I was the diet Coke of Goth. Not quite suicidal enough.

b) Despite a passing interest in Wicca, hippydom and all things “yeah man, let’s have a bong and talk about it (or rather slump onto our backs in a totally incommunicative state and not talk about anything),“ I soon grew out of it and started having baths again.

c) Crusty festival goers selling cheap tat annoy the bejasus out of me.

So to save myself an attack of the spleen I usually avoid the Peace Festival, immerse myself in my own cynicism and become rather jolly in my solitude.

This attitude has not changed with the passing of this year’s Peace Festival due to the Peace Festival residue that was spread around the building when I returned to work, bushy eyed and bright tailed, on Monday morning.

Some enterprising hippy had decided to dump a horribly chintzy yellow sofa in the skip that I had hired last week to offload some of the detritus that was clogging up the building’s storerooms. It’s horrible. Urine yellow and with horrible tassely bits furring the seams of the sofa cushions. It’s plainly obvious that on the hottest day of the year this example of 1970’s bad taste was not hoofed down from the outskirts of town. Instead some crusty stall holder had decided to free up some bong space in the back of his camper van by offloading his granny’s old divan into my skip. Git. Still, at least they put it into the skip and didn’t sail it down the river.

But worst of all – worst, worst of all – some moonfaced yoghurt weaver had obviously set up a stall selling chalk in order to encourage the kids to express themselves graphically on the paving stones right outside the building. Among the traditional icons of flowers and love hearts (I do hope Baz & Shaz will be happy together) there were 7 – count them – 7 depictions of cocks complete with monumentally hairy balls. Cocks of every different colour and persuasion. Most of a size so eye-watering that they cannoned their way across 5 or 6 paving slabs at a time.

Ah bless. A phallocentric mating ritual had evidently taken place outside the auspices of Leamington’s defunct Tourist Information Centre (yes, it is still closed).

These new additions to the world of pavement art meant that yours truly had to patrol the building with a bucket of water and a broom on a day when he had far too many other things to do in order to rid the town of its unwanted chalk cock-dom.

Give peace a chance?

Peace off!

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.

A Load Of Rubbish

Just over a week ago I had the misfortune of being called out in the early hours of Sunday morning to attend a fire alarm activation at my place of work. I didn’t get away again until 7 am.

Seeing the windy streets of Leamington Spa at this time in the morning as I wended my way home was something of a revelation.

Or rather like something out of Revelations.

I don’t think I have ever seen so much rubbish and stomach lining spread over so much surface area of one town before.

It looked like someone had disemboweled a rubbish cart at 15,000ft and let the contents fall to earth in a 10 mile radius.

It was horrendous. Chip paper. Newspaper. Polystyrene burger cartons. Styrofoam cups. Half chewed chips and chicken nuggets. Shredded lettuce. The ubiquitous McDonalds paper bag. The entire gherkin crop of Bulgaria. All of it knee-deep.

I swear I saw pigeons re-enacting the trash compactor scene from Star Wars.

Worst of all though was the vomit.

We are talking vast, half congealed porridgy oceans of the stuff.

And it was multicoloured.

My worst encounter was under the seat of the bus shelter right outside the Parish Church. It was pink with red bits in it, flecked with the odd strangulated shard of green. Someone had either thrown up a chicken tikka or had crawled home minus their entire stomach and the taste of their lower intestines dissolving on their tongue like a rubbery alka seltzer.

If this is the morning after the night before I’m glad I no longer frequent pubs or go out drinking as a social pastime.

What disgusting selfish creatures we are.

All this waste. All this mess. And it probably happens every Thursday / Friday / Saturday night of every week of every year in most towns across the Western world.

Here are major contributions towards global warming for you. Here are carbon footprints that smell as bad as they look.

As I picked my way home through the detritus the litter pickers and street cleaners were already hard at work picking, sifting, lifting and hoovering up the evidence of a single night’s pleasure seeking.

I felt sorry for them. Sorry that such thankless work is plainly necessary.

Oh I know it gives them a job. A friend of mine once threw litter quite deliberately onto the street and justified it by saying "it gave someone a job and allowed them to earn a living”.

Well, as I said at the time, such a stupid argument could also be used to justify rape, child abuse and murder but I’m sure the police and the support workers and the attendant counsellors would all rather be doing something else if they could ever express a choice about it.

Forget dubious employment opportunities, what this billowing carnage said to me was the majority of our species just don’t have any true thought or respect for their own environment or the people they share it with. That maybe too many of us justify appalling behaviour and antisocial activity under the guise of “just having a laugh” and “just having a drink after a hard week at work”.

That maybe going out and getting yourself absolutely twatted on a Saturday night is not so much an innocent way to let off steam and de-stress but a way of proclaiming to the world that you really just don’t give a toss about anyone or anything that exists outside your own little sphere of beer-goggled selfishness.

What a load of utter garbage.

Our street cleaners are unsung heroes.

We’d all be dead or dying of cholera, typhoid and bubonic plague by now if not for their sterling efforts.

Gentleman and ladies of the broom, I salute you.

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.

Faith In Human Nature

A few months ago I reported on a monumental act of misfeasance.

Back in February somebody stole our green recycling bin that had been newly delivered to our house by the local authority. I had to go to the police (as directed by said local authority) and fill out various reports before we could be allocated a brand new one.

All this on top of some petty thief’s criminal attempts to foil my magnificent recycling plans was too much to bear. I suffered apoplexy, hysteria and gout and was hospitalized for several months. I suffered hallucinations and wrote them down as blog entries. I was not a well bunny.

Imagine the horror then of returning home at the end of last week to find that our general refuse bin (black this time) had also been snatched.

It was gone. Just gone. Left out for the refuse team who were due to empty it that day and then stolen in the prime of its life.

In the space of a second I was on the edge of full mental collapse.

One bin goes missing and you feel – despite the annoyance – OK, just kids messing about, some drunken a-hole having a laugh as he wends his way home. But two... suddenly it feels like a vendetta. Siege mentality sets in. The hatches are battened and the big guns wheeled out.

Xenophobia and misanthropy leap to the fore. Who was it? Who was it? Is this the start of a hate campaign? Are they going to steal our car trailer next? It was our Polish neighbours, I’m sure of it. It has to be! They speak with a funny accent and own three cars... it has to be them! Or it’s the chavs up the road. Of course! All that bling... it’s a telltale sign. They’ve got our bin hidden in the boot of their bright blue BMW...

By nightfall I had drafted a scathing blog, written letters to the editor of the local rag and dictated a letter to the chief exec of the council. I even considered writing to Boris Johnson but managed to reel the wavering line of my sanity back in before I crossed that point of no return.

Imagine my surprise then when, next morning, our black bin was mysteriously back on our doorstep. They’ve all got addresses on you see and some kind soul, finding it perhaps abandoned and enfeebled by the roadside had taken the trouble to return it to the family who loved it most dearly.

Oh joy.

What can I say? I felt a mite foolish. All that ranting and raving. All that class war mongering. All for nothing.

My faith in human nature has been totally restored. There are good people out there.

So God bless you, every single one of you. I shall think of you all every time I stuff a full refuse sack into my newly returned black bin.

I shall keep this country clean for you.

There is a corner of a foreign landfill that will be forever England.

Shed Love

Karen and I spent the Bank Holiday clearing out the garden shed; an onerous task that we’ve been putting off for ooh about a year. Ever since we bought the old homestead in fact.

To fill you in: Karen and I rented our house for about 2 years before buying it (not a long story, just a boring one so I’m going to gloss over it) – the upshot being that there were parts of the shed from which we were denied access by our then landlord (yes our shed actually has 2 rooms inside it). This wasn’t a problem. We just figured it was full of personal stuff – homemade porno, the odd manacle, perhaps the entrance to a hidden dungeon – and therefore left well alone. We bought our own gardening equipment and stored it in the portion of the shed that we could use and that was that.

Quite literally in fact. I have to say our gardening equipment hasn’t seen much action since we bought it (about the same amount as Prince William in fact) but that’s the subject for another post.

Anyway, a year after buying the place lock, stock and dungeon we finally got round to clearing out both sides of the shed to fully appraise ourselves of what we now own.

No homemade porno. No dungeon entrance.

Just loads of gardening equipment, including a complete lawnmower. Basically duplicating what we’d already bought ourselves which is rather galling but hey, at least our stuff is brand new as opposed to pre-1985. We also found we were now the proud owners of several large tubs of paint, several rolls of wallpaper, 15 panes of glass (which we shall sell on eBay) and a rather large bumble bee.

The bee seems to have set up home in a plastic bag which contained of all things a woollen Christmas stocking – the kind used for hiding presents in as opposed to naughty lady’s leggies – and was determined not to be moved. Even after the bag and stocking were removed the bee kept returning resolutely to the shed hoping to find it. It was quite affecting in a mildly impinging way.

Bees aside the task is at last complete. We’ve kept the good stuff and freed up so much space in the shed that getting access to the tools is no longer a problem. This bodes well for garden based DIY type activity this summer.

And we’ve amassed a huge pile of junk and detritus in the garden that Sir Ranulph Fiennes would be honoured to climb. This bodes well for several laborious journeys to the local tip.

None of which is terribly exciting but I was moved to record it here by Inchy’s recent post about garden sheds... and I felt the need to join in. Sheds are traditionally a bit of a man thing but I know that several humans of a feminine persuasion are also into sheds, my wife included.

There is something ineffably great about owning a shed. A garden with a shed is like a Bugatti whereas a garden without one is like a... a... well, the crap car of your choice basically.

I’ve got a shed with 2 separate rooms in it. 0 to 90 in 8 seconds, dudes. Vroom vroom. They're getting a hospital bed ready for Richard Hammond even as I type...

Bin Thief

I realize that this event in no way compares to happenings elsewhere over the weekend – oil rig bomb threats and fires in Camden, etc – but it has riled me nonetheless.

Last Thursday the local council delivered to all its district householders green bins for the recycling of garden waste. Karen and I were pleased because (a) we like to think we’re pretty green minded anyway and (b) we’ve got a shedload of chopped brambles and cuttings that need disposing of.

Late Thursday night – within hours of the bin being delivered – it was stolen by a zealous gardener of unknown identity... though I believe in this case this particular Monty Don favoured certain varieties of hop as opposed to hyacinths and hollyhocks.

The next morning, on finding I’d been the victim of a bin-napping, I was rather gobsmacked and more than a little annoyed. Everybody in the entire town is getting a bin. Everybody! So why go to all that trouble to nick one?

To make it worse I naturally rang the council, explained what had happened and requested a replacement bin if at all possible. I was told it was indeed possible but they could only replace the bin provided I gave them a police crime incident number first.

Yes.

I had to ring the police, ask them to halt all their ongoing murder enquiries, report that my new bin was stolen, get a crime number from the disbelieving police officer and then ring the council straight back with it.

Aside: ringing the police took two attempts as the first time I rang I was told they were all at lunch and could I please ring back after 2pm?

Oh how I love the country England is turning into.

I hope the life of whoever has stolen our bin provides them with enough crap for them to make good use of it.

I am now off to the doctors. I woke up with an eye infection today – gummy eye and blurred vision.

I am not in a good mood.