It’s all the fault of Christmas. The bin men are in a right old tizzy, and the neighbours are, like us, looking out of the front window to see who has got it wrong. We have the bonus of Sharon across the road who has never to our knowledge got it wrong. So it’s in ‘Sharon we trust’.

The council put the new collection dates out on the web, but some of our number prefer to go against the grain and complicate the issue by putting out the wrong bin on the wrong day. These are the natural anarchists in the road. They probably don’t even believe in Santa Claus. Some seem to be able to put several bins out at the same time and generate enough waste to fill their own truck single-handedly.

We are in an area that puts out food waste in a small caddy type thing. One man from the council comes down with a big bin and empties each caddy into his big bin before returning to his small food bin lorry. By the time he comes back up the road, his bin full of uneaten food, it has turned to soup. This is then poured into his little old soup truck and tootles off to the soup bank, where they cook it up again and end up making a compost. Which they sell back to us if we want compost for the garden. This is my own simple reading of the situation. The collecting man ( and it is always a man here) has possibly one of the worst jobs in the area, the smell of what he collects is overpowering. You can smell the truck a street away. I hope he gets extra for deodorant and nostril damage compensation. I hope the driver of the Yuk Truck is careful too, one collision in that and he would really be in the manure. Im sure they must have especially tough brakes fitted.

As for the recycling, we have a comprehensive guide supplied on line on what we should be doing. We recycle cardboard in a big blue bag that takes a superhuman effort to fold large boxes within, though to be fair to the collectors they will take these separately.

I bet you’re glad of this knowledge. Other stuff is sorted into plastic and tins in one box and paper and glass in another. Paper and glass together? Yes. Seems to work.

Everybody sticks to the rules of leaving the boxes neatly by the road whilst the collectors have their rule of never quite leaving it as they find it. I suspect also that bin men , and again they all seem to be men around here, generally have a continuous conversation going on whilst collecting. This means that their voice volume is high to compete with the clattering and the inevitable clashing of glass bottles in this dry white wine area. One can hear every word “ …corse if you’d ever read Marcel Proust Dennis you’d know….” Proust? Who does he play for then Gary? ……”Don’t you know nothing Den? He used to say “ Always keep a patch of sky over your life” ….brief silence… then mainly to self: “I thought he played for Nottingham Forest….or was that the other philosopher: Brian Clough”.

There are rarely brief moments of silence. Philosophy keeps them talking.

Of course after Christmas the volume of recycling goes through the roof, and they collect on odd days, not the usual. This puts some people in a flap, they should look out for Sharon, she will have got it right. “May the sun shine over her every day”.

Random drawing of a sleeping cow which has no relevance to the text above. Just here because I like it, or we could call it recycling. Oddly this comes from one of my most visited posts, which is titled: ” Cows sleep standing up”.

I have no idea why this is deemed to be interesting