You’ll know the feeling: it’s that moment when a large, bulky item – perhaps a plastic children’s sit-on tricycle or a degenerating Ikea bedroom unit – leaves your fingers after months, years of being tolerated.
Despite the stink, there’s no denying the unsurpassed elation that a trip to the tip can induce — a rare sublimity that some people pay thousands to achieve through exotic spa treatments in the Alps, or by snorkelling in crystalline waters with banjo-playing Buddhist monks in Borneo.
As the detested tricycle or Ikea unit crashes down behind you, you are transported. You stride back to your car, a taller, happier homo sapiens, one that commands all the suburbia he surveys. You slap your hands together – you remember the A-Team, don’t you – and reach from the boot of your car for the next sacrificial offering to the great mortuary temple of consumerism.
We are my friends, a society addicted two things: shopping – and then throwing away that shopping.
I know I’m not alone because the tip comes up more often in conversation than you might imagine – typically, though not exclusively, among men.
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