Searching our bins is a rubbish idea

All too late in the day, I have come to worry about the stuff I put out in my waste bins. It is not the recycling issue that bothers me, but what council officials, poring over my detritus with rubber gloves in some sanitised hell in Maidstone, might find out about me, and what they might decide to do as a consequence. Obviously, nothing good. It never is anything good. They are not going to ring me up and say sir, as a consequence of your rubbish inspection, we’ve decided to reduce your council tax per year to what it would cost to feed a family of 12 in Mali for seven decades. That never happens. We are told that rubbish inspections will en-able local councils to help us more efficiently, to provide a better service. But this is a transparent lie; everything local councils do makes things worse for the individual, and the more they know about us, the worse it will be. By ‘tailor services to your requirements’ they mean charge us more, or stop the services altogether because we’re too right-wing, or too white. And help us more ‘efficiently’? Local councils which use the word ‘efficiently’ are like Reinhard Heydrich using the word ‘humanely’. They are laughable non-sequiturs.

I don’t know how it was allowed to happen, but these local councils have started looking at our domestic waste, peering into our bin bags, pulling apart the remains of our Sunday roasts, skiffling through our discarded mail to see if it says anything interesting about us. This is a worry. Among the stuff in my latest black bin bag were the following items:

*An empty bottle of 2009 E&J Gallo White Grenache Californian Chardonnay. It was brought by a friend, OK? And we didn’t drink any of it. Our friends drunk it.