Melissa Kite’s Real Life
I’m prepared to do almost anything rather than apply to Lambeth Council for a bulk waste collection. Every human being has their limits of endurance, a line of suffering beyond which they begin to contemplate committing terrible atrocities themselves in order to make the pain stop.
It’s just that most people never get pushed to those limits. I’m sorry if that is a deeply cynical world view, but I have come to believe, through bitter personal experience, that we all have the capacity for evil if only we are pushed to a place where we are forced to deploy it.
If I lived in Wandsworth or Westminster, for example, I would not even get near to a place where I could conceive of having a relationship with my odd-jobman just so that he would take my old aquarium to the municipal dump and I wouldn’t have to book a bulk waste collection.
I would pick up the phone and call the council and go through official procedure to book a time for my disused fish tank to be picked up from outside my house, along with a few other bits and bobs of outsized rubbish. I would even pay a small annual charge for the privilege of using such a service. Happily, I would pay it.
But these are not the conditions under which I live. The prospect of paying a greedy, rude, aggressive left-wing council a one-off charge of £20 to pick up my old fish tank makes my insides feel like they are turning themselves inside out. I could put three more ‘bulk items’ out with it, if you please, but any more than that and I get charged £5 per item.
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