Rubbish
Last night I started sweeping myself (and hellhounds) together to go back to the cottage late even by my standards. All that drivelling about music on the blog yesterday, on top of having had an actual breathing musician with a violin in residence for the two days before, positively forced me to the piano as if fired from a slingshot.*
I tore myself away at last, and I was rounding the end of the kitchen table and aiming for the All Stars and hellhound leads and saw . . . the flowers still standing in their bucket of water, waiting to be jammed in vases and stuck around the kitchen and sitting room. Arrrrgh. Our local florist is actually open on Sundays—she’s opening up as I spill out of the bell tower—and she’s fallen into the delightful habit of giving me the stuff past its best on Sunday mornings, and of course I have to buy something to go with it. I end up with a posy or two for the cottage and a small armful for the mews. Which I have lately developed the deplorable habit of thrusting in a bucket of water and forgetting.
Curses. Hellhounds looked at me in disbelief as I started pulling vases out of the cupboard and dragging the compost bucket over to the kitchen sink, and went back to their bed with much aggrieved over-shoulder looking. You’re feeling aggrieved, I said to them, I’m feeling aggrieved.†
So we finally got back to the cottage very late indeed.
Monday morning is rubbish pick up. It’s alternate weeks here—ordinary rubbish one week, green and recyclable the other week. My bins live at the top of a very nasty narrow plant-overhung steep stair, which I have to bump the bins up and down—and my compost bag lives on the other side of the greenhouse, in the garden—and the little area between the greenhouse and the gate to the stair is very small, very dark and very crowded.†† So it behoves me to get the bin-putting-out done in daylight, and not wait till I get back to the cottage in the middle of the night. I’m pretty good at this, rather surprisingly, although I have the scars from the weeks I forget. I had done it yesterday.
Except I had put out my green bag and recyclable bin and my neighbours had all put out their straight rubbish bins. FRELL. FrellfrellfrellfrellungleblargFRELL. So—very very late indeed—I bumped the straight-rubbish bin down the steps and painfully dragged the full recyclable bin back up the stairs again, and the green bag. In the dark. Furthermore the green bag was dead full—I’d been chopping stuff down the last couple of days partly in anticipation of being able to get it hauled away on Monday—so I was going to have to take the beastly thing to the dump††† myself. FREEEEEEEELLLLLLL.
I’d also put Third House’s very full green bag out by its gate. I went round (. . . rather late) this morning where Atlas was mending the flat tyre on the wheelbarrow‡ and discovered . . . an empty green bag. I stared at it. They picked up the compost bags today, I said in strangled tones. Atlas looked at me in astonishment. Well yes, he said. Didn’t you put it out by the gate?
YOU MEAN IT WAS RECYCLE WEEK THIS WEEK? MY NEIGHBOURS AT THE COTTAGE HAD ALL PUT OUT THEIR RUBBISH BINS.
Atlas, the ratbag, was amused.
The rest of a rather snarly hellhound hurtle ensued. In fact an extremely snarly hellhound hurtle. My recyclables bin was also dead full, and while I can haul the frelling green bag to the frelling dump without a lot of (frelling) difficulty, which is to say it will fit in the boot of a car, dustbins are big heavy stiff plastic things that will most emphatically not fit in the boot of a car and furthermore, to get more in the thing you tend to tear everything up which means its contents are not going to transfer to car-friendly containers at all gracefully.
Hellhounds and I had taken a last loop past the pet shop and were on our way home when . . . what should my disbelieving eyes alight upon but the rubbish lorry . . . and it was headed toward the cottage, not away. Don’t tell me they hadn’t got to my street yet. . . . it’s hours later than usual.
They hadn’t got to my street yet. I’d missed the compost run, but that was less important. I banged hellhounds into the kitchen with what they considered very unattractive and unseemly haste—hellhounds are thoughtful about things like climbing up the steps to the door—there may be a snail on the wall or some other riveting piece of wildlife—and sitting to have their harnesses taken off has philosophical implications.
I tore back outdoors again, dragged the green bag back down the greenhouse stairs so I could get to the recycle bin. I could hear the lorry’s roar getting louder as it munched its slow but steady progress down the main road to my cul de sac. Yanked the rubbish bin up the stairs . . . pulled the recyclable bin down the stairs‡‡ again. . . . And there was a nice rubbish collector coming up the hill to take it away.
Who knew rubbish collection could be so exciting.
* * *
* For anything I’m trying to write for anybody but Oisin^ I keep saying that I don’t want to make it wildly demanding and difficult. I’d much rather at least try to write something that ordinary people who fool around with music when they aren’t saving the world or riding jump-offs at Burghley or weeding the gravel that they put down to suppress weeds^^ could have a go at. I said this to Nadia who suggested that one guideline for the violin would be as few sharps or flats as possible.^^^ No more than two, she said. So of course what I’ve started writing has three flats. You start with the noise in your head, you know? Just like writing a story. And you start getting it down on paper and then you discover what it is, because it already is that. It’s not up to you. It’s never up to you.
^ I enjoy watching Oisin sweat. And he’s so good-natured about it it’s hardly worth trying to resist temptation. Fortunately the muse is willing to collaborate about this.
^^ I laughed hollowly when I saw the little gravel courtyard out the kitchen door at the cottage (I having been in love with the cottage from the moment I set foot across the front door, which is only about eight feet from the back door). I know about gravel. But I’m afraid I do watch with a rich durable amusement when someone puts in a gravel garden with a few artistically arranged boulders and some desert grass in what is fairly evidently the fond belief that they have now done the garden and don’t ever have to think about it again. Ho ho ho ho ho. There’s one of these around the corner from Third House. The weeds are getting almost as tall as the desert grass and are rapidly drowning the Ophiopogon Planiscapus Nigrescens http://www.guardiangardencentre.co.uk/Index.cfm?fuseaction=product.standard&continueaction=category.standard&category_id=466&producttype_id=48210
probably to the latter’s great relief since it tends to like shade.
† But the shades-of-hot-pink explosion in the hall is very successful, I think.
†† Water butt, spare bricks, bags of compost, bricked-in flowerbed whose edges are perilously lined with pots, two dustbins, etc
††† Ahem. The Household Recycling Centre.
‡ I hadn’t realised it was flat till I’d tried to move a lot of bags of soil improver in it last Friday
‡‡ It is worth noting that I didn’t fall down the stairs myself and break anything, nor did I drop any of the damn bins, or the compost bag, or anything else. No scars. Amazing.
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