Rubbish

 

I have had an email from Shropshire Council. ‘You will need to book a slot if you want to take waste and recycling to one of our centres’. It goes on to say that I will have to supply ID and my car number plate. I must ring up or fill in a form online before I arrive.

All this is to make sure we do not have to wait in a queue, but we just turned up last week and there was hardly anyone there. The staff were helpful and we soon finished. Mind you it will stop out of county people coming and reduce trade waste, they say.

So, we will have to make an appointment to get rid of rubbish from now on. What a procedure it will be, almost like getting a doctor’s appointment.

 All this is a far cry from how we got rid of our rubbish when I was young and living on the farm. Of course, there was little waste, as we grew all our own fruit and vegetables and had our own meat. But eventually we bought tins of golden syrup and jars of marmite.  There was no wrapping paper and so we had no bin. When a jar or tin was empty, we simply carried it to our ‘tin dump’ which was an old cattle water tank in our stackyard. After about a year when it was full Dad loaded it onto a trailer and the rubbish was buried in one of our fields where it would rot away or remain hidden all these years underground. So different from today.

I had to go for a check-up recently to our nearby hospital. The Outpatients’ waiting room has all been refurbished and was very smart. There was a notice saying that you must not stand whilst you were waiting and of course there were many chairs to sit on. They were all arranged in rows facing the television which was tuned to morning TV. It was like a cinema except that you did not have a choice of seating. Also, the screen was not very big and the sub-titles seemed minuscule. I was on the back row. There was a man sitting with me staring at the screen. He leant towards me.

“My sight is not as good as it used to be and my hearing aid does not seem to be working. I can’t hear it or see it, can you?”

These days sitting on the back row is not as exciting as it was when I was in my teens watching a film at the cinema.

Nothing stays the same and perhaps it is for the best.