How Do You Throw Away A Bin?

The dilemnas and learning experiences continue to fascinate and bewilder me.

When I moved into my house I had to buy stuff, house stuff. Stuff that people use to live in a house, like ironing boards, irons, soap and one of those wire grill things that go inside the grill pan. It was, and is, a daunting and exciting time. Just when I thought I'd done it all I realised that I'd never set up home alone before.

Run a company? Audition for a band? Be in a band? Get bullied by two daughters? Yes, I'd done the lot, the level of success is debatable but I had done them. Faced with a blank sheet of paper and a need to figure out what a fellow has to buy to start a home I was flying blind. It's one thing to go in a restaurant and choose from the menu but it's a different ball game when you have to decide on the meal without having options to choose from, then buy the ingredients and cook it all too.

So, to avoid confusion I'll summarise my metaphors and similes; I had a blank sheet of paper and I was flying blind, going into a restaurant and choosing from the menu is a different ball game. Wow, that really does sound like one of Dubya's better speeches doesn't it?

Back to the main plot though. I've now got most of the basics covered and life, or the shopping and buying part of it at least, is ten, perhaps eleven times easier. These days instead of going out and having to think of buying stuff from scratch I can go out and remember what I need and then figure out if I've got it in stock or not. Mostly, but there are still things I discover at times.

You get my drift, you know, instead of cooking something, realising that I need to add soya sauce, discovering that I have none and trying to remember to buy it next time now I know that soya sauce is an essential for me and all I have to do is to check whether I have it every now and again.

The best bit about my new found level of competence is that, now I've got the basics covered, I can go out and look for nicer things. I find it to be quite a lot of fun, suddenly coming across a nice pepper grinder or bumping into a bargain of a great lamp or whatever.

During the January sales I stumbled across one such example. It was one of those highly trendy stainless steel kitchen dustbins knocked down to half price and, being a man, I was sensible enough to buy just one. My understanding of women is remote and useless but I do know that one of the laws of the sexes is that a woman, on seeing an item reduced to half price, promptly buys two or more of the things. The proverbial law of averages, that one that doesn't exist but gets quoted all the time, then steps in and decides that us men, on seeing something reduced to half price, either buy one of them or none at all. Thus it all balances out and, on average, men and women buy exactly one of the half price things.

I'd bought this highly trendy touch to open Brabantia bin and was very pleased with it. I took it home and set it up in the kitchen, as one does. I even bought the "special" Brabantia bin bags. They cost about a million times the price of normal white bin bags and they come in special packaging. I don't fall for all this marketing hype though.

The problem then cropped up. I'd bought a relatively cheap stainless steel bin when I moved in, a pedal one with average features. Had I been the owner of a Colombo 7 house this bin would have been the sort I'd happily keep in the servants' kitchen. They'd use it and the odd passer by might see it and think it was acceptable. But I'd never put it in the fancy kitchen, that front part that only ever gets used when my wife makes pineapple fluff or chocolate biscuit pudding. No sir, that would be where I'd proudly display the Brabantia. To remain strictly true to my roots I'd probably cover the thing in cling film as well.

But here in Teddington I have a mere one kitchen and it's even smaller than my bass drum. It's so small that I can't even cook a cat in it, let alone swing one. And it's definitely not big enough for two kitchen bins. I can only thank my lucky stars that I don't own a cat as well, that would be disastrous.

You can see the seriousness of the situation. I've got no servants' kitchen in which to put the old bin, I've hardly got enough space to move in and now there's a bin surplus. A similar thing happened about a while ago, when I was still with the ex, but my parents needed a new bin and took the spare one happily. But I don't think a kitchen dustbin (nearly new) is the sort of thing one can give to a random friend anyway.

The binmen in my area are a strange breed, with laws, rules and regulations that no one, particularly them, actually understands. The borough started its new recycling thing recently, with all kinds of mailshots and advertising telling all of us lowly residents exactly what we should do and what to expect. It looked simple and easy, as well as good for the environment; basically put all our recycleable stuff in a white bag, which had been supplied to us, and it would be collected on the allotted day. The allotted day is Thursday, but I shouldn't think you care about that, I just thought I'd supply the information for the sake of clarity. But the bastards nicked my bag and I haven't seen it since.

One thing I know with absolute certainty is that my binmen will not even think of taking away the old bin. It's ironic for sure. Binmen who won't take a bin are a bit like pilots who refuse to actually fly or priests who don't believe in God. The old unwanted bin currently languishes in my back garden, like a sad stainless steel bin, in a garden, almost identical to one.

I'm left perplexed. How do I throw away an old bin?


Vut too doo?