Rubbish advice

Cursing myself, I rushed out of the house in my pyjamas. I’d forgotten to put out the brown recycling bin for the fortnightly collection. I lifted the lid on next door’s bin and peeped in. Empty. I must have missed the truck by minutes. Now I was in trouble. Putting the recycling bin out on Wednesday morning was my one and only duty while she was away and I’d fluffed it. She’ll do star jumps in the hall when she comes home and finds out.

Hoping there might be something I could do to salvage the situation, I rang the council office. The woman dealing with refuse collection enquiries sounded young and happy. I’d missed the fortnightly food waste collection, I said. Was there anything I could do about it? She was making a note, she said. It would be treated as a missed bin and someone would be along to empty it within the next three days.