As if by magic, a letter arrived with answers to all my composting questions. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had received warning from the council that I might be in a food waste recycling area. Nothing was definite about it. It hadn’t seemed to occur to the form-shoveller pursuivants that they might be the only people who knew the answer. Despite having invented the rules, they seemed determined to persist with the notion that they could not be held responsible for knowing whether they were applying them to my street or not.
I tried ringing the council’s recycling line but it was permanently busy. Apparently they are suffering an unusually high level of calls since putting leaflets through thousands of people’s doors warning them they could soon be fined up to £1,000 for not doing something they may or may not have to do.
So I wrote about how confused I was. A few days later a letter arrived informing me that I am indeed in a food waste recycling area. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
On the front cover of the leaflet there is a picture of an old lady with long white hair smiling as she does something with a banana.
It’s hard to work out what exactly she is doing, it’s very ambiguous. She appears to be looking lovingly at the banana as she places it into a see-through bag which also has potato peelings in it. She is holding the bag over the sink, presumably to demonstrate one of the ways one might avoid causing a mess in these situations. A bottle of Mr Muscle is the only other object in the frame.
Maybe it’s not a whole banana. Maybe it’s an empty banana skin. It certainly makes more sense that way. But in any case, she is smiling more than is feasible for an old lady to be smiling while recycling her food waste.
Wouldn’t an old lady be tearing her hair out as she grappled with the blasted starch bags and food caddy? Wouldn’t a more realistic picture be of an old lady with a phone clamped to her ear holding perpetually for a recycling adviser while dropping the banana skin on the floor? Then another picture on the next page of the leaflet could show her flat on her back with a broken hip after she’s slipped over on it.
In the end, I had to ring the service centre and hold for an age, because the leaflet informed me that I should already have rolls of starch bags, which I did not.
The options, which they have obviously had to revamp a bit since recycling went communist, were most amusing: If your bin has not been collected because you are a Tory-voting, climate change denier who is refusing to put it out correctly because you are staging some sort of pathetic civil protest please press one.
If you are unable to put your bin out properly because you are old and weak and a drain on front-line services, press two.
If you would like more information on how to become a responsible, left-wing citizen who frets constantly about the planet’s disappearing natural resources, press three.
If you are worried about this Conservative-led government’s savage and irresponsible spending cuts, you are right to be concerned. All local services will soon be terminated and the world as we know it will end shortly. For all other inquiries, please press four.
After a while, a man with the deepest voice ever answered the phone. I told him I didn’t have any starch bags and that I kept leaving notes for the bin men to tell them this.
‘Newts?’ he asked.
‘Notes,’ I said.
I wanted to persist with the newts line but I couldn’t think where to go with it. ‘Yes, newts. I paint little messages on their backs like, “We need starch bags” and put them out next to the wheelie bin but they keep getting run over…’
But I didn’t really need to work to make the situation ridiculous. I was ordering bags made from potato starch from a man who sounded like Barry White so that a loony left-wing council could force me to put my food scraps in a plastic tub as demonstrated by a grinning old lady holding a banana in a propaganda poster.
No wonder I’ve been having strange dreams lately. In one, I’m putting black bin bags into my car. Sometimes, I’m running along a dark country lane, my arms full of bin bags. Despite the weight of the bags, there’s a great feeling of freedom. Then I’m stopping in a forest and opening the bin bags and…oh, no, it’s too dangerous. I hope They aren’t reading this. I’m probably not even allowed to dream that.
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