Complete Rubbish - Sunday

‘Oh deep joy.’ I say, visibly drooping.

‘What?’  Questions my wife. ‘It’s only a bit of gardening. It will make a change for you to do some hands-on work.’

I’ve been press-ganged into shrubbery cutting on my weekend off. Working alternate Saturdays for a lifetime, hasn’t been my greatest love but it does mean I’ve often managed to swerve some of those traditional manly jobs involving wrenches, power tools and remembering whether it is righty-tighty, lefty-loosey - or the other way round.

‘Anyway I do a lot of hands-on.’ I grumble.

‘Not that I’ve noticed.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Let’s just get cutting.’ Says my wife. ‘We can do a couple of trips to the tip over the weekend, then.’

And that’s why I was complaining. Now I’m all for penguins not choking on plastic bottle tops and I’m right there with the next man in ensuring Polar Bears don’t run out of ice - as long as they remain on someone else’s continent. But the misery of a trip to the Municipal Tip is unsurpassed. Overnight, when people began to recycle and separate rubbish into different colour-coded bins, the staff at the local tip became neo-Nazis. I believe the French call the town dump a dechetterie, which seems about right, as it’s a shitty experience.

I see the little Hitlers, in hi-viz jackets watching me even as I open the car tailgate. They also watch little old ladies struggling with bin bags bigger than they are, but never move a muscle to help. I’m guessing health and safety - or bone idleness.

‘What you got there?’ Demands a particularly ratty-looking operative, as I struggle with a defunct set of full-length blinds we no longer need. Yes, my wife has decided that as we are going to the dump, not only are we going to dispose of the thorny-cuttings that have made my arms look like I’ve gone twelve rounds with a tetchy tiger, but we can ditch all the other detritus clogging up the garage that never houses a car.

‘Metal.’ I say, heading for the appropriate giant bin. I’ve identified it as the most likely deposit-point, as its not general waste, green biodegradable garden mater, paper, cardboard, or approved plastic suitable for processing (check local providers for re-cycling suitability).

‘Nah mate.’ Says the camp guard, holding up his hand like a scruffy traffic policeman. ‘That’s got fabric.’

Yes it has. Well done Sherlock. Those are the bits that keep the sunlight out and helped the product  get its name.

‘So, general waste?’ I say, not entirely confidently.

He looks at me as if I’m the one smelling of rotting fish.

‘Not with metal on it.’ Counters captain Haddock disdainfully.

‘So you had to detach each fabric panel before you could dump them separately’ Laughs my wife as I tell the tale. ‘Maybe he just realised you were an estate agent, saw the sticker in the car window.'

‘I took that out.’ I tell her grumpily.

‘Probably just as well.’ She says giggling. ‘Nobody loves an estate agent - oh, apart from me.’ She adds hurriedly, and not entirely convincingly.

‘It’s not funny.’ I snipe. ‘They were even checking the green bags to see what sort of cuttings I was ditching.’

‘You’ll know what do to tomorrow then.’ She says slyly. ‘There’s two more big bags of garden waste to go.’

There’s a queue right out to the road on Sunday and I can feel my temperature rising. After ten minutes of gridlock I decide to sweep into a space outside the gates and walk the bags in.

‘No mate.’ Calls an angry voice as I unload. Well he’s wrong already, I’m no mate of his.

‘Can’t do that,’ says the SS trainee. ‘Got to drive in.’

‘You’re not serious?’ I spit back angrily. And the jobsworth points to a camera on a pole. ‘We’re watching you. Evidence.’

After the event, I think of a vitriol-laced diatribe demanding if I now have to sort deciduous, from evergreen before using the appropriate garden waste bin. But in actuality, I do a three-point turn and rejoin the queue. At the back.

You can see why people fly-tip.

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Muck And Brass - Saturday

‘Do we have to do this?’ I whine ungraciously to my wife.

‘Sometimes you have to get down and dirty.’ She replies pulling on the rubber gloves.

‘But I’d rather watch the football.’ I tell her, wondering if my back will be up to this.

‘Put it on record and you can come back to it when we’re done. You never know you might even enjoy it in a weird way.’

So I stoop down and lift the up and over door.

I must look at scores of homes a week and have seen thousands over my, less than glorious career, but rarely do I see a garage containing a car. Yes, you get the occasional motoring geek who concrete paints the floor and has the whole expanse clinically clean and organised like an operating theatre. The type of obsessive oddball who stencils the shape of his tools on the wall where they must be re-hung after use and who organises half-used paint pots in colour coded order, pastels on the left, bolder colours to the right, gloss and white spirit on a separate shelf. But most garages are like mine, full of rubbish yet to go to the tip.

‘I might need that wood one day.’ I tell my wife half-heartedly, as another sneeze erupts from the dust dancing before my eyes in the watery sunlight.

She looks at me scornfully. My DIY skills, or lack of them, are legendary in this household, there’s nowhere to hang rusting tools on any of the wall-space here. In fact, the only hooks I tried to mount on the block-work are now lopsided, with one rawlplug protruding from an oversized hole, as a crooked stepladder hangs at an improbable angle. I’ll fix that later.

The six foot – approx two metres, but buyers should take their own measurements as figures are for guidance purposes only – piece of skirting, is duly posted in the back of my company car, alongside the old pine shelving, several spent bike tyres, a brace of obsolete computers, the once top-of-the-range Sony VHS recorder and my eldest son’s redundant cathode ray television set. Numerous other black bags are wedged in the load space as the car sinks ever lower on its springs. I’m only making one journey.

‘What are these, can we ditch them?’ Asks my wife holding up several hard drives from the spent computer towers. I may not be that handy with a screwdriver but I laboured to remove the old spinning discs from the once expensive machines. You can’t be too careful with personal data and I don’t want some kid in an African village seeing my log on details, or the history I built up before I realised how to, browse in private.

‘Need to keep those, Data Protection Act.’ I tell her officiously. It seems to work. Years of selling have taught me if you say something with enough conviction people invariably believe you.

‘What are these doing here?’ Asks my wife tugging back some big sheets of cardboard I’ve been meaning to recycle for half a decade. I colour up as if she has actually found my Internet search records. Three separate for sale flags, belonging to three different estate agency companies, one of which has gone bust so its board and logo might be worth keeping as a collector’s item, are dustily revealed.

‘Isn’t that theft?’ Scolds my wife as I bounce up and down on the wooden poles and try to break them into manageable sizes. The polypropylene flags aren’t so easily destroyed, I know they burn well every November 5^th but I’m already imagining the difficulty I’m going to have at the municipal dump. They charge for commercial waste and pleading one of the firms no longer exists, isn’t going to cut much ice with the officious waste control operatives.

‘They take down our boards all the time.’ I appeal in mitigation, as I try vainly to fold the fully waterproof, ideal for outdoor applications, fluted sheet advertising hoarding in on itself. Damn that stuff is robust. Not sure which dump bin it will go in, but I’m guessing a couple of millennium to decompose.

I wonder what the score is?

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