Last night I dreamed I’d been to a rubbish tip again.
Where have they gone, those halcyon days when anything could be made to fit into a black bin bag if you could just dismember it enough? When cardboard boxes were just for the sharp stuff that would cut a hole in the bin bag? When just throwing it out qualified you for a Brownie badge.
As I crested the hill of my dream I beheld, in the golden glow of a rising sun, a host of whiter-than-white seagulls hovering and dancing above shimmering dunes of glistening tin and glass. My heart leaped with a long-forgotten joy. When I awoke, only the salty trails of my slumber-fed tears remained.
You knew where you were with rubbish when I was a girl. Whether you left it in your wheelie bin for the invisible magic bin man or tossed it out of the back of the car over a cliff of nostril-blasting ever-shifting waste, it all went the same way. It was so reassuring.
We were promised landfill for all eternity. Mountains of it, alive with the sounds of bulldozers which swept away all our dirty secrets and planted green spaces and children’s playgrounds on top. Coming clean was so much easier then.
Now we are Green, but then we were greener. Plastic islands in the Pacific were a world away. How could we know they’d be visible from space? All that stuff floating on the sea used to be called flotsam and jetsam and was mostly bottles that bobbed innocently onto our shores with messages inside. Or maybe something useful from a shipwreck.
But enough nostalgia. The age of innocence is over. Being Green with a capital G is a serious business.
Spontaneity has to take a holiday. Cleaning out the garage is now a precision operation, not a free-for-all. Because arrival at the recycling centre unprepared will be a cause for serious stress, not to mention a good telling off.
They like nothing better than giving you a good telling off, the ‘green gestapo’. On my last visit, I was ordered to dismember a framed picture with a broken glass into its component parts and and cross my palms with lethal shards to place them into separate skips.
It’s enough to bring on a bout of anarchy. But taking a leaf out of Jeremy Corbyn’s book, I’ll settle for a quiet sulk.
Border Lines 