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Tuesday 24th October 2017

5446/18366

I am properly gravitating into the country life. I spent most of today worrying about the bins. 
I’ve always loved bins. Bins and the dishwasher are exclusively my domain and God help anyone who touches either. And I thought things would be good out here for me because we have four bins. FOUR! Some people don’t like having lots of different bins. And I am one of them. Because I want more than four.
I believe I have discussed it before, but there is a bin for recycling (except paper), a bin for paper, a bin for garden and kitchen waste and a bin for everything else. All the recycling bins are emptied once a fortnight and then the rubbish is taken on the weeks that they’re not taking the recycling. But we’ve just moved and have a baby who likes to fill four nappies an hour and so we have much more rubbish than the bins can hold. They collected the recycling today, but my rubbish bin is already full. And we had overflow paper and loads of cardboard boxes and a full recycling bin with another bag or two of recycling. We’ve been told that the bin men are very fussy and won’t take stuff that isn’t in bins (though they’ve taken our bags of paper before and all the cardboard boxes we’ve put out), but the council will not let you have an extra bin unless you have a huge household. So where does that leave me? Is it OK to find someone else’s bin by the kerbside and if it’s not full put some of your recycling in it? Or is that the kind of thing that will make you an outcast in the village? I mean you’re recycling so you’re saving the world and if the bin is out and ready to be emptied then you’re not actually stealing any space from anyone. But I bet it’s frowned upon. And that people are burned in wicker men for less. But what if one recycling bin is an old lady that lives on her own and has three tins of beans to recycle and one bin belongs to a household that will fill it in a week? 
Word in the village is that the council are going to take the food recycling bin away unless you pay an extra £40 a year. What is wrong with these fuckers? I need more bins, not less. And they should be paying me for my lovely compostable leftovers. This rumour was enough to send me to the internet to look for a composter. That’s how country I am now. Not only obsessive about bins (and getting to the point where I might murder someone for using my bin, even if it wasn’t full) but trying to make my own soil in order to save £40 (even though the composter was more than that).
I did slip some of my recycling into a quarter full bin in the dead of night last night. Will I be caught? I don’t see how. Luckily the broadband is so bad out here that none of them will ever see this blog. 

There was me thinking that moving to the country might be the end of comedy inspiration and then it turns out that the petty concerns of the countryside are the exact fit for my comedy. I should have come here years ago.


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