Thursday 16 September 2010

What a load of rubbish

I've been down in the dumps recently. ACtually, that joke doesn't work as well these days when you have to say "I was down at the recycling centre today" - honestly, progress is ruining old gags. Thankfully someone I work with told me he was going to speak to someone about getting his eyes lasered and I did the old "I've come to get my eyes sorted" - "That's as maybe sir, this is the butchers". Some gags progress can't touch.

Anyway I digress.

I've been down at our local rubbish emporiums recently, shifting the usual from the garden - leaves, branches, Myleene Klass's still twitching corpse - and it's been hard work, thankfully the hourly trips to the dump offer comic gold.

Firstly there's the brilliantly random signage. They've got a big area for scrap metal so they've painted in 3 foot high letters "SCAAP", forgetting that the letters A & R are not the same.

Then there's the brilliant sign on the landfill skips that say "NO CHILDREN". I'm very close to walking up with a smallish bin-bag and asking the men at the dump 'I need to recycle these children, if so - which area?'

And the men who work there are brilliant, sometimes helpful, sometimes overly interested in my rubbish. I brought an old lawnmower down and some chap immediately said "I'll help you with that". But when I passed the area for electrical goods later it wasn't there, I imagine it's on ebay by now or he's riding it round the back of the dump. I once got rid of a pool table and I was assailed by about half a dozen workers who were all determined to "get rid of that for me". It's like The Wombles meets Shameless.

The final thing about the dump is that it instills that primal spirit in me - I am man, I have been to dump - making me feel I could easily pop home and assemble furniture or perhaps kill a mammoth before tea.

I didn't by the way, as I wouldn't know which recyling bin to put a mammoth in after I'd killed it.