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.
The sort of ‘bulk items’ I currently have stacked up in my garden that I am forbidden to put in, or, god forbid, by my bin which would cost me £20 per group of four and £5 extra for each one over four, include an old broom handle.
Now, I’m no great student of Aristotelian logic. But it cannot be consistent with the natural laws of the universe that disposing of an old broom handle costs ten times the cost of the broom itself.
As such I have been staring at these odds and sods — the broom handle, some wire netting, a few broken terracotta pots (is a large, broken pot in three pieces one item or three? Discuss) — and thinking about putting them in the car, driving them to the stables where I keep my horses and throwing them into one of the industrial bins there, which seem to be full of anything and emptied every week by Surrey district council, no questions asked.
But there’s more. When Stefano the Albanian builder rang me the other day to tell me he couldn’t redecorate my spare room because he was too busy, but he would like to take me out for dinner, I did not say no.
Normally, I would say no to Stefano asking me out. He does it every six months or so. He once took me for pizza but when I insisted on going to Pizza Express and sitting at a table instead of ordering a take-out from Dominos and eating in the car, he got grumpy and let me pay.
Since when he has been threatening to take me for tapas. I’m not sure if he has found a drive-through tapas where we can eat in the car, or whether he means he will take me there and I will pay, but I do know one thing: he’s got romance on his mind. I’ve been handling it discreetly, fobbing him off with excuses that won’t hurt him too much and interfere with my renovation plans.
But the presence of an upside-down fish tank in my front garden is a game-changer. If I go out for dinner with Stefano, he is bound to agree to put the tank in the back of his Skoda estate and take it to Smuggler’s Way municipal dump.
I will not have to ring Lambeth Council. I will not have to spend half an hour going through a deliberately malfunctioning automated phone system. I will not have to give a load of bandits my money. I will not have to worry for days about whether the fish tank is positioned correctly outside my house ahead of the pick-up and whether, if it is one inch out of place, I will be subject to a crippling fine.
If I go out with Stefano my fish tank will be taken away and all I will have to do is…Oh well, best not to think about that now.
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