It is only Monday and already I’m thinking about bin day.
The stress is almost unbearable. There are so many uncertainties, it brings me out in a sweat. I might miss the collection by sleeping in too late. My household rubbish might be ignored or my recycling rejected, for god knows what reason, so elusive are their criteria. You need a degree in materials science to differentiate between the forms of plastic; to understand what’s permitted or disallowed. Then there’s the danger that gulls and foxes will savage the bags and leave my refuse strewn outside my house, so that 112everyone can see my discarded beer cans, ready meals for one and leftover meat, stinking in the sun.
No matter what I do to distract myself, bin day lurks at the edges of my waking thoughts, haunting me with its imminence.
I wonder if anybody else feels this way?
I cannot believe so, otherwise more people would be up in arms about it. Organising protests. Signing petitions. Demanding to speak to their MP. The whole street would be talking about bin day. Not that I bother listening to my neighbours, with their lies and accusations. As if I’d kill cats and foxes then leave them in my backyard to go rotten.
What nonsense.
They’re a worse class of people here in Ramsgate. Not like in Hampstead, where Linda and I spent most of our married life. We liked our neighbours there. They looked out for you.
How’s your day going, Steve? They would say to me. I’ve got an Amazon parcel for you, Steve. Love the new Audi, Steve, very nice.
They were the sort who could afford five-bedroom houses in London. I’m not a snob but it goes without saying that a higher property price threshold sorts the wheat from the chaff when it comes to neighbour quality.
That was a wonderful house. Big front garden. Room for two wheelie bins by the viburnum hedge, accessible by dustbin men without any need to drag them into place on the big day. We could consume as much as we wanted and chuck all the waste in the wheelie bin. When it became full, the second bin was backup. Linda and I could go to Edinburgh or Paris for a break, then return to find the bins 113empty. Clean as a whistle. No litter all over the road. They had a machine that tilted the bins directly into the van.
Ruthlessly efficient it was in Hampstead, back then.
Recycling was easier, too. There was a tub for food waste and they gave us spacious colour-coded boxes so that we could toss in the plastic and paper, and never think about it again.
Saying that, I’ve always been sceptical about recycling. My old mate Ollie says it’s a scam and they shove it all in a hole with the usual garbage. Pile earth over it. Pocket the government’s money and ride the hell out of that gravy train under the guise of ‘global warming’.
Still, I’m a man who plays by the rules. If there’s a system, I follow it. Cannot help myself. I’ve got a thing for order. It’s a quality of mine that got up Linda’s nose eventually, after the first decade of marriage, but that’s marriage, isn’t it? A breeding ground for animosity. Watching her stack the dishwasher was a horror show. Bowls and plates tilted into each other. Cutlery dangling through holes in the tray so that the blades jammed and the crockery came out crusty. Linda could see what the system was – what room there was in the machine and what slots were allocated for each item – but she didn’t care.
Linda, you bitch, I’d yell, raising the hammer up high in my trembling fist, that’s not how things are done!
But you know, there were some good times, back then, before that bloody virus disrupted everything. She was earning a fortune from her consultancy job and I was doing okay with a little freelance accounting. We had what we needed. A car, nice house, pleasant neighbours, excellent bins, and a collection system which worked very well. 114
It’s not like that now. Not in this town. They make it hard for a man like me. Very hard indeed. There’s no space for a wheelie bin outside these Victorian workers’ cottages. Instead, they provide an industrial sack which you’re supposed to hook on your railing. There’s enough room inside for about two small bin bags. That’s it.
You want to put more rubbish in? Tough luck. You can’t.
Instead, those extra bags lie out in the open air, totally exposed, where they are torn to shreds by foxes or herring gulls. Even inside the sack, your refuse is accessible to any animal with enough tenacity. All your waste ends up on the street the next morning so that your neighbours can judge you. Make accusations. Call the police. Whatever.
Same goes for the recycling. You can forget about plastic containers. I have to put all my recycling in a council-issue pink polythene bag with Get it Sorted! written on it. Use anything else and they won’t pick it up. I once put my recycling into a black bin liner but wrote the words RECYCLING – PLEASE TAKE, COUNCIL OVERLORDS! on a massive carboard tag, yet they ignored it. You must use their silly bags or be damned. Which means that next-door’s vegan hippies can tut at my empty tins of Heinz beans and sausages.
What a shitshow.
I rue the day Linda made us move here. It was all her fault. I don’t even believe she had Covid anxiety, as she claimed. She just didn’t know how to transfer her consultancy work online. Couldn’t handle the technology. Got ideas in her head about connecting with nature. Wanted to flee the capital and come to the coast for a fresh start. Although I would never use the word ‘fresh’ here. Flyblown, maybe, but never fresh, not with the bin situation the travesty that it is. 115
The day we moved here was the day it all went wrong for us. Perhaps that was Linda’s plan all along. Drag our marriage to the coastline and let it rot, picked apart by feral beasts until it was nothing but bleached bones. Instead of going out every day to earn money like she used to, she stayed indoors, tormenting me with blithering diatribes about mindfulness until my ears could not take another word, not another bloody word.
Well, it worked, Linda. Consider me tormented, Linda. And now you’ve gone, my mindful Linda, leaving me to deal with bin day all alone.
This heatwave has been going on for two months. I’ve never known anything like it. You can’t leave your bin bag out in this kind of heat. It reeks! Sure, it might be alright for the vegans next door with their potato peelings and pumpkin seeds, but I’ve been throwing away meat. There’s no way I’m putting that into a sack outside my front door. It’s just not right. May as well lay out a smorgasbord of snacks for the local pests and let them come from miles around.
Neither can I risk stinking out my backyard, not since the incident with the dead cat, or the neighbours will start having a go at me again. This is why I’ve been storing perishable rubbish in a chest freezer in the outhouse in my yard until bin day. Stops the smell. Keeps it from going off. Avoids predation by beasts. 116
I bought the freezer second hand, using money I cannot afford to spend – not until I can access that house sale money in Linda’s bank account – and all because I got sick of foxes, cats and gulls poking around the bin bags that I left in my backyard after I missed a catastrophic two collections in a row.
I still shudder to think about it.
I missed the first one because I had gone on a trip to visit my sister after the lockdown ended, and the second because I slept in, so I didn’t get my rubbish out in time. It meant I had several sacks of waste in the back going funky in the relentless bloody sunshine. My yard became a feeding ground for scavengers and, yes, unfortunately, one of the cats did die. Not from my doing but from its own incompetence, getting stuck in the outhouse and sweltering to death. I assumed the stink was from the rubbish, which was why I never noticed.
One day the neighbour, Phil – an absolute bellend, I have to say – was poking his bald head over the fence, asking the whereabouts of his cat and wondering if I could check the shed. Then his wife – don’t know her name to be honest with you – stuck her big face up next to his, so they were like Punch and Judy, bleating on about how they were sorry for the trouble but they were distressed about their cat and concerned about the smell coming from my yard. They didn’t have much sympathy with my refuse problems and kept nagging me until I was forced to open the outhouse door in a huff. It was a bit stiff, so I gave it a yank, then all these bluebottles came rushing at me.
Phil and his big-faced wife cried out before I even saw the cat lying there, dehydrated, legs stiff. 117
Stupid creature.
Anyway, if that’s what happens when there’s a dead cat in my yard, the neighbours are going to become suspicious again when my perishables start going off. So now I parcel them up in cellophane and put them in the freezer. When it’s bin day, I transfer the contents to a black bag, then get it onto the road. This is not something I can do the night before, because foxes feast when it’s dark, nor in the early hours of the morning, as that’s when the birds descend. It’s hatching season right now. Every chimney in town has a gull, fat on the rubbish it steals from unprotected bins.
Thing is, while the neighbours carry out their whispering campaign against me because of the dead cat, and that fox they said I killed with a brick, they refuse to acknowledge the effort I make to contain my rubbish in a sanitary way that doesn’t encourage vermin. Aside from spaffing cash on a freezer, I bought a new wheelie bin to put outside my bay window so I could store rubbish in there instead of those idiotic sacks. But some snake in the grass complained. A woman from the council rang up and told me that the bin men were not allowed to extract bags from an unauthorised wheelie bin. Besides, she said, it was jutting onto the pavement, causing an obstruction to pedestrians. She was sorry, but I would have to return to the sanctioned sack system.
I said to her, look, love, your sack system is a disgrace. All it does is leave a trail of devastation. There’s a godawful pong all summer, I said, which didn’t happen when I was in London. She replied, Well you’re not in London any more are you?
The bloody cheek. 118
No, I said, I am in a kind of hell called Ramsgate, watching other people’s crisp packets roll down the street like tumbleweed.
Well, she said, in a quite high-handed manner, that’s the system we have here, which snookered me because, as you know, I’m a sucker for a system. This is why, under great duress, I have introduced a combination of freezer technology and an alarm clock to ensure that what I throw away gets taken away.
Good riddance to bad rubbish, as they say. Haha!
Well, this is a right load of arse. Looking in my chest freezer, I see that there’s too much organic matter for the two bin bags I can fit in the council-approved sack. An obvious solution is to shove it in the back of a car and drive to a tip, but after I got banned for drink-driving Linda said that we couldn’t afford to a car any more, and besides, it was unethical to pollute the air for the sake of our convenience, so that was that.
Silly cow.
Linda and I never got round to kids. She wanted a career and I didn’t want toddlers coating our house in piss and shit. So I don’t have some strapping lad I can call to help his dad take some refuse to the tip, and there’s nobody with whom I am on good enough terms to ask for a loan of their car.
That said, it’s too risky to get other people involved in bin day, so I’m extracting the waste in incremental stages. I 119put some of the stuff from the freezer into the black bag collection last week, and from the looks of things, I have another two bin days before it’s completely gone. So I cannot even breathe a sigh of relief on Friday afternoon and kick back with a few Stellas, because the process is not over, not by a long shot.
This is what I mean when I say unbearable stress. I’m not only thinking about this bin day, but two more bin days after that.
To add to the pressure, this heatwave shows no sign of ending. It’s worse than the one last year. I’d get panicky about the environmental causes, like Linda used to, but I read online that actually the ice caps are gaining more snow, contrary to what scientists have been saying, so I am not about to become another sheep, mindlessly nodding along to the green agenda, while they remove all of our liberties. I’m a thinker, not a doer, as Linda herself told me, albeit with an unpleasant look on her face.
Make no mistake, I’m all for being efficient and keeping things clean, so I’m naturally environmentally friendly. I don’t need to virtue signal about it. But Linda droned on endlessly about her ecological awakening after we moved to the coast, as if we were going to save the world simply by not living in London. She was always trying to impress the hippy family by saying things like: Oh, the big city became too much during the lockdowns and we wanted to simplify our lives and get back to basics. Reduce our carbon footprint. Care less about business and money. Ha. As if that was the real reason and not because she bottled her job because – well, I don’t know why, something to do with reading too much lefty middle-class guilt bollocks in The Guardian. 120
Linda didn’t realise how ridiculous she looked, a fifty-two-year-old woman becoming woke at the cost of everything we held dear. Our home. Our friends. Our car. Our front garden with its massive wheelie bins.
You’re wrong about man-made climate change, darling, I’d say, holding her throat tightly, feeling the sinews twist beneath my fingertips. You’re playing right into the hands of global elites who want to install a dictatorship.
I don’t know if I fully believed that or not, but it was nice to see her eyes bulge.
What a disaster. My worst nightmare.
On the eve of bin day, somebody has stolen my council-issue sack. When I went out this morning to get milk from the corner shop, it was no longer hanging from the railing outside my door.
I’m wracking my brains to figure out how this could have happened.
About six months ago, it blew away in a storm, so I was forced to steal one from the senile old lady’s house down the road. But last night had been calm and windless. Deathly still. Which could only mean that this was sabotage. Someone probing my weak point. Trying to get at me the best way they know how – through my bin. Maybe it was the hippy kids next door, the ones who think I’m killing all the baby gulls, or Phil and his wife getting me back for the cat. 121
Whatever the reason, I am now in a state of total binlessness.
This has raised the stakes significantly. Anything I put outside will have zero protection from the scavenging monsters of Ramsgate. And by that I mean foxes, cats and gulls, not the neighbours, hahahaha. Although who knows if there is a difference any more? Humans and beasts alike prowl around my front door at night, meddling with my property, interfering with the order of things.
Trouble is, I cannot phone the council to get another sack delivered because there has been some kind of block on my phone number, ever since I took up a campaign of daily calls regarding my grievance over missed collections and how wheelie bins would end the horror of their sack-based system.
I have no regrets. If the community won’t act in its own interest then I shall take on the burden of responsibility and get something done, even if it means I am scorned and shunned for it. There was another, more famous man who underwent a similar ordeal, nailed to a cross on Calvary Hill, and we all know how that turned out.
I shall let history judge my deeds.
Anyway, whenever I phone them, the council now leave me on hold or an intern passes me from pillar to post until I’m forced to give up. It’s an outrage. I pay my taxes. I’m a qualified accountant from a middle-class background, not some dole-bothering scumbag. My wife was a highly regarded marketing consultant whose advice helped hundreds of small businesses flourish, boosting the British economy. She was even interviewed in a magazine. Though truth be told, her success was a great deal down to me 122allowing her to take the more dominant work role, while I selflessly put my accountancy dreams to one side and ran the household. She could barely fill a dishwasher, never mind deal with something as complex as bin day.
The only talent you have, I told her, arm locked behind her back, pushing her against the sink, forcing her peroxide blonde head down towards the foaming dishwater, is teaching people marketing strategies, while I have to multitask using a myriad different skills for a myriad different tasks, both physical and mental. Yet you’re the one featured in a magazine. You’re the one getting fawned over on Twitter. You’re the one the neighbours want to talk to. You make me sick.
Thing is, I am right, even if it’s not politically correct to say it. The world has gone wilfully blind at the command of a vocal minority. Nobody sees the guy like me, busy below deck, keeping the engine room running. I am one of those men who stepped aside so that women could fulfil their insatiable ambition for power, only to find that when it came to the crunch, my wife didn’t want the responsibility. All our hopes thrown away. Yet it’s me who the council consider a pariah and a drain on resources.
It’s maddening because I really don’t want this hassle in my life right now. I don’t want to have to ring up officials and then have them snooping around, poking their noses into my business. I only want a quiet life, and for that to happen I really need these next few bin days to go without a hitch. There are items in my freezer which urgently need to go into the dustbin vans and get taken far, far away from here. It’s all packed in where there should be bags of peas and oven chips, so the situation is not ideal. Not ideal whatsoever. 123
There’s alarming information on the news about the damage that the freakishly hot weather is doing to the country’s infrastructure.
Bridges and dams cracking.
Railway lines warping.
Flash floods.
They’re saying the system cannot take it. That we’re on the precipice. It’s beginning to worry me. I live in fear that a power cut from a natural disaster might result in the freezer switching off for days on end. The stench of decay will waft from my yard like an olfactory distress flare, bringing all and sundry to my doorstep, asking me inconvenient questions for which there are no easy answers.
I had a torrid, sleepless night. The humidity was unbearable. It’s like living in the tropics these days. I had the bedroom window wide open, but all I could hear was the sound of the TV blaring from the house of the deaf sod across the road, blended with the shrieks and barks of rutting foxes.
A right hullabaloo.
By the time I finally managed to fall asleep, the evil gulls commenced their dawn chorus, cackling in spirals above the rooftops, waking me up again.
Lying amidst all that clamour at five a.m., I wondered if it would be easier if I just got up, made coffee, and started packing the bin bags. I had switched off the freezer late last night to allow a bit of defrosting, otherwise the rock-hard, 124blockish contents of my bin bags might arouse suspicion. From my observations these past weeks, the bin men rarely consider the contents of bags. They just pick them out of the sack, or directly off the street, and hurl them into the truck. However, I don’t want to give them any reason to consider that I might be throwing away something which is non-regulation. Which is why I need the meatier packages to have a bit of natural give.
It was while I was mulling over these issues that I fell into a deep, exhausted slumber from which even my alarm, set accidentally at a feeble volume, could not arouse me at eight a.m.
Now I am awake! And what is that I can hear? Crunching plastic! The shouts and calls of binmen! The chunter of a large engine!
Can it be that time already?
Oh my god, no.
In a panic, I tumble out of bed and run downstairs in nothing but my underpants, skittering into the backyard and pulling open the door of the outhouse. There is soupy brown water seeping from the defrosting freezer, flooding the concrete floor.
I fling open the freezer lid and heave the cellophane-wrapped packages into bin liners, swearing profusely. The beaks of some of the herring gulls are poking through the wrapping like yellow hooks and there’s blood trickling from some of the packages, but there isn’t time to worry about that right now.
I fill the first bag, half with the freezer meat, half with general waste from my kitchen bin. Then I run outside and dump it on the doorstep, glancing up nervously for circling 125birds. I can see the dustbin lorry grind to a stop about five houses down. With time running out, I return to my yard and pull out some of the heavier, more problematic meat waste. I load as much as I can into the second bin liner, along with what’s left of my general kitchen refuse, just as air brakes hiss outside the front door.
They are here. I need to move fast.
I haul the bin bag down the hall and onto my doorstep, panting heavily. To my horror, there is a bin man approaching to my right just as, to my left, Phil’s big-faced wife emerges from their front door.
She turns to me with a look of distaste as I launch forward to hand the man my bin bag. I feel a tug when the bag snags on the railing spike, but there is nothing I can do. Momentum carries me forward while the torn black polythene yawns open and its contents spill onto the pavement. Semi-frozen blocks of unwanted meat thwack onto the slabs, sending up tiny jets of red spray, among eggshells, burnt toast and bloodied rags.
Standing there in my underpants, on what might turn out to be my final bin day, I despair at what – in the light of a bright Friday morning – is clearly not regulation refuse. Even beneath all the wrapping you can see the flesh and sinew.
Despite the sheer awfulness of the moment, I have a perverse notion that I should turn to Phil’s big-faced wife and say, Well it looks like the cat is now literally out of the bag. But I think twice about that, as the matted peroxide blonde hair bristling through a tear in the cellophane is obviously not that of a cat, nor a fox, although there are plenty of those in the other bin bag, should anyone want to 126take a peek, and they probably will now, worst luck, things being how they are.
The meat might be defrosting but time has frozen in this excruciating moment. As we stand there – me, the dustbin man and Phil’s big-faced wife – staring at my unspeakable waste, we enter a hell in which the only reality is bin day, stretched out for an eternity, and all the joys of man are but a fleeting dream.