Virus Diary Week 20

WITH all the fly tipping carry-on raising a stink in north Belfast, we can’t tell if we got carried away or whether we really did spot someone unloading black bin bags at a much loved beauty spot this week.

We’d been out on our daily exercise - still sticking vaguely to the early lockdown guidelines - cycling up past Minnowburn in full lycra. Worse even, our jersey, stretched translucent across the pandemic paunch, matched the bicycle as if owned by a lithe pro. It’s a pale turquoise colour, known in cycling circles as Celeste. If there’s one thing worse than a Mamil it is a garish full-kit Mamil.

Anyway, as we crested the little hill just beyond the car park, a middleaged woman seemed to be carrying plastic bags from the boot of her car and up into the woods. We stopped, just far enough away so as to be completely useless, wondering what to do. We took some useless photos, just far enough away to not get the number plate.

And rather than risk confrontation and being run over by a mid-range hatchback and folded into those black plastic bags, we waited. Then we cycled gingerly back to where her car had been and climbed up the steep bank, cleats clogging in the muck, into the woods where we found… absolutely nothing. Had our minds been playing tricks on us, has the bug got the better of us finally? Who knows. So what music rattled between our ears throughout this strange little adventure? Anything by Garbage, perhaps, The Trashcan Sinatras do a neat line in melancholy or Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush would capture some of the disquiet as we scrambled up that sodden bank? But no, as we trundled off into the distance feeling rather confused, one song kept reverberating. “Underground, overground, Wombling free…”

DASTARDLY ACT Fly tipping