Monday, and Camden council have yet again failed to empty my food waste bin. They never miss my rubbish or dry recycling – it’s only ever the smelly stuff. I give my neighbour’s brown bin a little kick. Emptied! This feels personal. I call the council. ‘Look, this is a nightmare,’ I say. ‘This is the second week in a row. Are we on a blacklist?’ Pause. ‘Our operatives are too busy to keep lists,’ says the lady. Hang on – you mean if they weren’t so busy, they would?
Things my husband and I have bickered about this week: my devotion to an ugly but comfortable pair of rubber pool slides the colour of NHS hearing aids; a particular sort of belch he does; a particular sort of cough I do; whether or not I am ‘cruel’ to confine our spoilt, idiotic cat to the ground floor of the house at night, thus making her ‘sad’.
My husband, Giles, is the restaurant critic of the Times, so we eat out a lot. This week we go to Pinna in Mayfair. Eating out is now a necessity if nothing else: cooking at home is out of the question as the unemptied food waste bin overflows with no room for even a single extra potato peeling. More than ever I wish I owned a pig. Left to our own devices my husband and I will argue about anything – the pool slides, the cat – so we often invite friends to distract us. On this occasion we take with us Sadie Holland and her husband, the history podcaster Tom.
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