Big, bold and everywhere
Roy Hattersley
It is now nearly a year since we were invaded by aliens. Although they did not have the same air of childish innocence, they turned out to be more insidious than the Midwich Cuckoos. They came not singly, or even in battalions, but in pairs. And the houses into which they insinuated themselves welcomed them because of the good we all thought they would do. We had been prepared for their arrival by a long propaganda campaign which did not mention that they would defile our village each Tuesday and that some of them would stare at us menacingly for the whole week. Now it is too late to reclaim our streets. The onward march of the wheelie-bins is irresistible.
I still have no doubt about their environmental good intentions. They are the creatures of a district council which is so green that it sends a juggernaut to park outside my garden gate on every sixth Saturday and invites my neighbours to feed it with the flotsam and jetsam of village life. At first there was an undeniable fascination in watching it chew up old television sets, buckled bicycle wheels and threadbare carpets. It would be an exaggeration to say that its engine throbbed with the rhythm of the countryside. But the mastication only goes on for a couple of hours and it seemed — indeed still seems — to sacrifice eardrums in a good cause. I took the same high-minded view about the onrush of the wheelie-bins.
Each house was allocated two — green lid for the garden refuse and grey for household rubbish. They came with a stern injunction that to deposit blue material in a grey bin — and vice versa — might lead to its rejection by the men who empty them. I do not believe that for a minute. The ‘bin-men’, as I used to call their predecessors in Sheffield when I was a boy, are the sole of geniality. The old and infirm who cannot wheel their bins into the road are offered ungrudging assistance. If contents have ever been inspected for what would amount to contraband, I have never seen it happen. Anyway, it would take a braver man than the average council employee to lift the lid on what this village throws away.
Our wheelie-bins are designed for easy management. Conveniently located handles allow them to be guided along on rubber wheels which never make the eccentric progress that seems to be a built-in feature of airport trolleys. It is true that they are exactly two inches too high to fit into the bin-store which I had specially built to accommodate the old-fashioned dustbins which they replaced. But it is just and fitting that one man’s kitchen garden should be sacrificed for the whole community. So, you may be asking yourself, what am I complaining about? The answer is the mess they make of the village while they are waiting to be emptied.
Most of us providently wheel them out to our gates on Monday night. And there they stand, for most of Tuesday morning, on guard like mutated Daleks. Many remain there all day. A few are still at their posts on Wednesday. Families on holiday leave them out for the full length of their absence. And some are unavoidably a permanent feature of our lives. They become an incongruous intrusion from the well-ordered present into part of the village which was built in the higgledy-piggledy past.
Some of our cottages have back walls which literally lean against the steep slopes into which, long ago, the roads were cut. Residents in rows of such houses have nowhere to put their wheelie-bins except outside the front door. They do their best to hide them behind lattice-work fences and potted plants. But a wheelie-bin big, bold and plastic — is not easily disguised. So a village which argued with the Post Office for months about the most aesthetic location for a pillar-box has to endure the permanent sight of refuse containers in the streets.
Of course, nobody dares complain and, in any event, complaint would be fruitless. Wheelie-bins are progress and progress is irresistible. Every beneath-the-breath grumbling is frowned upon by the soi-disant progressives who talk about — but never install — personalised wind turbines and solar panels. But at least no one can accuse us refusereactionaries of being Nimbys. In my backyard is exactly where I would like my wheeliebin to be. The problem is the obligation to take it out into the villlage.
© Roy Hattersley 2006
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