Dancing with Dustbins

Dancing with Dustbins©

By

Michael Casey

I was taking our smallest to school the other day, a Wednesday which is our bin day. In the old days as my daughter calls them, nailing me into my coffin already, in the old days when I was her age we really did have bins. We had dustbins made of steel, they were heavy old things. The dustmen used to come up the entry and grab the bins and carry them away up the entry, then when they got to the dustcart they’d hurl the contents inside then return quickly, I can remember the crashing sounds as the lids came off the dustbins were moved about. The cart itself was a curved shape with sliding doors coming down to keep the smell in, there was no such thing as a compacter back in the 1960s. Progress was plastic bins replacing steel ones.

Moving away from Birmingham, just over the border so to speak, I had to buy plastic sacks for the dustbin which you have to buy yourself. The water tasted different too, culture shock so to speak, different water and put out your own bins. Where we live we have foxes too, so it was  a Nature Programme at night, you could see and hear the foxes raid the plastic sacks for food. Our dustbins were their fridges so to speak, an all you could eat buffet for foxes, and cats too.

Time moves on so now we all have wheelie bins, they are visual litter as some folks leave them in their front garden, it’s such a depressing sight, wheelie bins galore, save the planet and destroy the visuals. You have 3 wheelie bins, rubbish, recycle, and garden waste, not forgetting 2 smaller containers you get for food waste. God help us, bring back Garde de L’eau.

When its dustbin day it’s like a swat team or an old fashioned gunfight at the OK Coral, the lads appear, the recycling dustcart moves slowly and menacingly along the streets, bin men to the front and bin men to the rear. One goes ahead and swings the wheelie bins into order so they can be trotted out and executed, or should I say lifted up and emptied before being swung back on the pavement. The lads are very fit, the way one lad moved the bins about convinced me he should be on Strictly Come Dancing, effortlessly he grabs and swings, swings and grabs. The fluidity of his movements is the key, I spent 3 years in a hotel, I know what he knows, you have to swing it, otherwise things are as heavy as they are, but with a swing things are lighter. Just picture the scene dustbins changing into dancing girls, dancing with dustbins, dancing with dustmen, ballet dancers falling down like leaves around the compacter. I was positively vetted by a ballet dancer myself but that’s another story……