My obsession with rubbish drove me to share a bath with an Arsenal-supporting teddy bear
Every now and again — and we have had two recent instances of the phenomenon — somebody in local or central government has a good idea for making the nation more sensible about the rubbish our households create. The latest such idea has been that we should be charged for the stuff. The binmen would (perhaps) weigh each black plastic sack, or (perhaps) count the number of separate packages; and, depending on the calculation, home owners might be charged a premium or allowed a discount on their council tax. Another idea has been for a fortnightly rather than a weekly collection.
But watch how those Whitehall, town hall or Westminster heads duck back down below the parapet when, from the direction of the general public, the missiles begin to fly. The problem, you see, is this. We British are profoundly interested in rubbish. We teem with opinions on the subject. Something about the dispersal — or indeed rescue — of waste speaks to our very soul.
Only a foolish public servant could suppose that there are any objections to his latest refuse plans that have not already occurred to us. We have most of us spent, in total, months of our conscious lives pondering such questions as how often the dustmen should call, how much they should be asked to take, what might be the limits to the type of thing they could be reasonably asked to take, whether we should be required to pre-sort our waste into categories — and if so, which — and what actually happens to the ‘recyclables’ the council collect after they have collected them. These great debates have already taken place in our minds. For politicians to stir them up again is about as wise as lobbing into a railway enthusiasts’ convention a careless opinion about the Age of Steam.
My late father would have walked the streets rifling through public dustbins if my mother had let him. In old age, only a generous occupational pension kept Dad from the hobby he would most have enjoyed: buying an old pram and wheeling it from tip to tip, searching for anything useful that might have been thrown away. Such joys would have prolonged his life by at least five years. When left alone in the kitchen he used to sort through the bin and retrieve jars of jam not altogether finished, or lumps of cheese needlessly (he felt) discarded by my mother. I have inherited his bin genes. A highlight of my week is consolidating the rubbish. I pull it all out, jump up and down on the tin cans, squash the plastic ones (remember to screw the tops hard back on, so they don’t re-inflate), and squish everything down into the minimum number of black bin-liners, which are then so heavy I can hardly carry them to the road. Back aching, I sink into bed, thinking happily of all that super-consolidated rubbish sitting by the roadside, to be borne away by a big lorry whose reversing beep-beep-beep fills me with joy as it crowds into my 6 a.m. dreams.
I have — oh boy do I have — many ideas to air concerning refuse collection and could contentedly fill the rest of this edition of The Spectator with them, if I thought you could stand it. I believe council ‘Compostabins’ are responsible for an explosion in Britain’s rodent population. I don’t believe Tower Hamlets Borough Council in London do in fact separate the glass, paper, plastic, cardboard, metal and foil ‘recyclables’ they ask us to jumble together to fill the pink plastic sacks that are (bizarrely) available for our collection from the local one-stop shops (ask the man looking after the public-access internet terminals).
I believe the carbon footprint of transporting glass waste then recycling broken glass into new glass probably rivals the footprint of making new glass from sand. I don’t believe anyone ever really did anything with those aluminium-foil milk-bottle tops we used to collect for charity. I believe Oxfam shops should be obliged to accept all the clothes and books we take them, rather than sort pickily through for what they want. I don’t believe there’s any future in charging householders per bag, as an element of our population would react by dumping their rubbish outside other people’s doors, or in public spaces. I could go on, but won’t. Suffice it to say that not long ago, passing a bit of wasteground near my London flat, I spotted a giant, Alsatian-sized teddy bear in Arsenal colours sitting sadly in the rain. I felt so outraged that anyone could have thrown such a bear away that I picked it up and, with its arms around my neck (and to the astonishment of passers-by), carried it home. Up close like this the bear didn’t smell too good. But I had by now become fond of it, so I ran a bath and tried to submerge it beneath the hot water. The awkward posture hurt my back so I undressed and climbed into the bath with the bear, soaping it up all over, and working up a good lather in its manky fur. Then I took it into the shower (where we should have started) to rinse it. Then I wedged it on to a central heating radiator to dry it off, sprinkling the thing with a whole bottle of unwanted cologne.
But when the bear began to dry, white plastic chips of expanded polystyrene began popping out of gashes in its fur — rents that had not been apparent in its earlier un-groomed state. I feared this bear had been abused. Being unable to sew and hesitant about giving my 77-year-old secretary the job, let alone taking the bear into the House of Commons where she works, I placed the bear on my bed and tried to mend the gashes with the jam-jar of safetypins I keep because on retrieving suits from the dry-cleaners I don’t like to throw them away. But the pins would not hold.
Eventually, bed and carpet covered in polystyrene chips, and fearful of being found with this giant toy, misunderstood and exposed to malicious comment, I came to terms with the truth that the bear had been thrown out for good reason. I carried it sorrowfully down the street late on the eve of the rubbish collection, telling myself (like those unmarried mothers who leave their newborn babies in telephone boxes) that I was really being merciful because kind people better able to care for the bear might rescue him before the binmen came. But the dawn beep-beep-beep filled my heart with foreboding and I dared not look.
Are bears recyclable? Where do they go? Does the fur have to be separated from the chips? Don’t answer, because I’ve done the research and I could tell you. But I won’t.
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