NETTLE RASH

So bin day rolls around again in its fortnightly way, and once more the separation of our household waste into its constituent parts is gratefully removed from the various nooks and crannies, surfaces and boxes of the kitchen and into the receptacles provided to make life easier for our council workers to remove it to the correct pile somewhere far away that I don’t like to think about too closely, but I’m rather grateful is there dealing with all its nastiness, although, in the olden days, stuff just went in the bin and the kitchen spent much of its time in relative tidiness.

These days, more often than not, our kitchen resembles a junkyard with plastic bottles being bagged in one corner, whilst tins, bottles and jars clutter the sinktops waiting to be washed out, and piles of cardboard accumulate in another spot, and the debris of various preparations of vegetables and salads, and a stack of used tea bags can be quietly mouldering in their various receptacles, waiting for transference to the approved collection bag at a time chosen to give any rats or foxes the least opportunity for rummaging.

Compared to the ones tolerated by many, however, our system is fairly uncomplicated. The cans and bottles go into a green box that is collected once a fortnight, along with any recyclable paper that must be placed in the plastic sacks provided for that purpose. On the alternative weeks, the black bags of “non-recyclable” waste and the clear bags of cardboard, garden and certain food waste are collected and, as long as you can keep on top of which week is which, the process remains pretty simple.

Really, there’s very little to complain about. Occasionally, stuff doesn’t get taken, and sometimes the bins and boxes are not returned to where they ought to be, but, in comparison to the young lady I once saw sorting her weekly waste into 14 different receptacles that took up half her garden (and would have blocked the back road if we had such a system here) I think we get off fairly lightly.

The problem, I suppose, is with a “one size fits all” policy that seems to exist in certain parts of the country. An elderly lady living on her own in a terraced house, who has to manhandle various wheelie-bins through from her back yard to her front step is patently not the picture in the minds of the policy-makers who might have lovely front gardens and convenient driveways running between their semi-detached suburban idylls.

Or perhaps I’m being too presumptuous about the lifestyles of the great and the good in the “decision making” set, (but I don’t think so…).

My biggest recent recycling problem came a couple of weeks ago when I went to retrieve the new bags that had been provided by the refuse collection operatives as they headed off to dispose of all our last fortnight’s rubbish. They had fallen down beside the bins and, as I bent down to retrieve them, my hand brushed against that huge weed that had been growing so verdantly next to the bins throughout the soggy part of our recent summer, i.e. most of it, and it was only at that painful moment that I recognised it as the rather large nettle it turned out to be.

Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! OWWW!!!

Yes, this saving the planet lark can be a painful old experience if you’re not too careful. I guess that it’s the price we pay for giving a damn. If, for example, I didn’t bother with such things, and just shoved the whole lot into black bags without any thought, my life would be far simpler, but I might be troubled by thoughts that I might very well be the one person responsible for ruining the whole planet. Equally, if I was the kind of person who didn’t care, then, by definition, I wouldn’t care, so it’s a bit of a conundrum.

Just don’t mention China…

D’oh!

I’ve taken to mumbling something about “saving the planet” these days whenever the checkout operatives at the supermarket ask me if I’ve used my own bags. I try not to mention that I drove there. Their interest in this has got something to do with points accumulation, apparently, although that particular bonus never comes to me as I’m carrying my points card under an assumed name. Yes, someone else benefits from my use of a ClubCard. Is this even legal, I wonder? Will the “ClubCard Police” now be hunting me down to reallocate my points back to me instead of the person who actually gets them?

If so, they’ll have to wait in line for the “Recycling Police” to have their turn, if the “Cycling Lobby” have left anything behind once they’ve finished with me…

That’s a longish tale that dates back to the days when I used to do my public ranting in print and a radical cyclist replied with an objection to my living so far from where I work that I had to drive there from what he implied was my luxurious mansion in the countryside.

Oh, how we… seethed…

Meanwhile, the tiny little ramshackle house I actually live in, and, incidentally, the only one I could afford within a ten mile radius of where I grew up, however, does spend rather too much time cluttered with assorted rubbish of the kind that once upon a time would have spent most of its time outside in the rubbish bin…

Once upon a time, in years when I was more eager to decorate my tatty little home than I tend to have been in recent years, I took a load of used decorating materials and other household rubbish to the tip and, whilst I was there, a discarded piece of metal from somebody else’s shower that had been just dropped on to the ground pierced one of my rather over-priced tyres, which didn’t fill my heart with much joy with the whole process of attempting to save my little corner of the planet.

I’m not someone who is opposed to recycling, in fact, far from it, I’m very much in favour of it, although I do baulk at some of the tales I am told by those who live in other, more tightly controlled neighbourhoods, and their struggle to keep on top of the many bins they must juggle and find garden room for, as well as trying to keep track of the many collection days they have to strictly adhere to, and the penalties for putting out whichever of their bins too early. I do rather feel that the imposition of the kinds of fines you sometimes hear about being levied upon the unwary, or the merely confused or forgetful, can sometimes do more harm than good when it comes to the encouragement of more of us to make the effort and recycle.

You get much better results with the carrot every time than with the stick I find, and the advantage with the carrot is that it’s far more disposable, too.