Is there a college course to better understand our bin collections?
THE mound of booze bottles spilling from our bin – an emerald and brown mountain of empty spirit vessels – show I’m committed to saving the planet.
We’re a family in denial. We haven’t got a problem, we’re just desperate to repair the torn ozone layer.
Unlike David Attenborough, I’m prepared to lay down my own liver to do that.
We’ve attempted to hide the scale of our alcohol consumption by covering the wine and lager bottles with a layer of jam and coffee containers, but the neighbours and binmen have seen through the shallow deception.
They’ve dubbed our modest home Hangover Hall.
One blue-rinsed Neighbourhood Watch member this week warned me: “Drink is a pathetic crutch.”
To be precise, Pathetic Crutch is a cocktail – Sambuca, Schnapps and cinnamon.
I know. I drank so many during a Greek holiday I mistook the bidet for a wash basin.
I blame the raft of recycling containers for exposing my wife and I to public ridicule.
The disposal of household rubbish was simple in my youth. Everything was simply bunged in a big metal bin with a lid for privacy: food, grass cuttings, pills, dead pets...
The embarrassment we endure on a fortnightly basis has spawned an unlikely empathy for Essex warbler and Loose Women star Stacey Solomon.
Stacey has, via Instagram, informed the world she’s been “bin shamed”, though her shame is not alcohol related.
She posted: “Our rubbish hasn’t been collected for a couple of weeks. I’m assuming something in there isn’t in the right bag, and oh my God (she speaks estuary English, so it’s actually, omagot!) the looks.
“I can’t take the bin judgment. I’ve had to shut the blinds. Two wheelie bins is not enough.”
She added: “I’m actually ashamed. For some reason, I feel like we have more rubbish than ever at the moment with the kids at home.
“And no one is sticking to the bloody bin rules so our rubbish isn’t being collected.
“And it’s bringing me down. I need to get so strict with the bin rules and then get out there and find the contamination and re-sort all the rubbish.”
We, at Hangover Hall, feel Stacey’s pain, particularly after one binman suffered a hernia shifting the empty vessels that briefly contained liquid responsible for making our Christmas merry.
But we’re not sure that pain merits the banner headline afforded it by our digital edition, BirminghamLive.
As a tabloid tale, it’s down there with, “Katie Price – the day I mistook pot pourri for bar nibbles” and “Martine McCutcheon’s wonky perm hell”. Stacey, be not ashamed. You, like my wife and I, are a victim of the complex recycling system. I’m dreading the introduction of a bin for old shoes. I can almost hear residents tutting: “They’re not only dipsomaniacs, they’ve got a foot fetish.” Things were so simple in the metal dustbin days.
Not now. I spent half-anhour on the phone last week trying to discover which bin to bung a deceased squirrel in.
“Was it a family pet?” asked the council bod.
It wasn’t. I found it dead on the rockery.
“Being discovered on the rockery doesn’t make it garden waste per se,” stressed the jobsworth.
There must, I’m sure, be a college night class you can enrol in to better understand the nuances of our ever expanding recycling scheme.
I learnt how many days there were in each month by reciting a rhyme. Will someone please invent a rhyme pin-pointing the correct days to put out the different types of rubbish.
There’s a week for bottles and jars, all of which have to be cleaned thoroughly before being put in the black box. I know this because a burly binman called Colin knocked on our door clutching a mayonnaise pot and told me I’d missed a bit.
There’s a week for papers, which go in a plastic bag.
There’s also a “green waste” receptacle, which is garden stuff, but doesn’t include the brown, needleless Christmas tree.
Garden waste doesn’t include paving slabs, fencing, stone gnomes or dogs with leads attached. They have to be taken to a tip where a fee is paid because they’re classed as industrial garbage. This is a nonsense – the gnome I wanted to offload was holding a fishing rod, not a blowtorch.
I had to chase after the van, weighed down by a large box that collects cardboard. The bloke told me it was too big and I’d have to cut it into pieces of eight.
It’s pure piracy.
“We can no longer treat this planet as a rubbish dump,” the chairman of our parish council told me as I placed refuse in my multi-coloured bins. Why not? It was good enough for my son’s bedroom…
“And unless we act now,” he added, “each household will face a £100 bill simply because we have exceeded the amount of rubbish we’re legally entitled to place in landfill sites.”
I gingerly grabbed the decaying chicken at the bottom of our wheelie bin and thrust it under the councillor‘ nose.
He winced, gagged then turned away. “Will a cheque do?” I asked.
“Yes,” nodded my former drinking companion Colin, “recycling is big business. My son’s started a business recycling discarded chewing gum.
“He just needs help getting it off the ground.”
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