A Load Of Rubbish.

Literally, a load of rubbish about rubbish. It doesn’t matter that it’s rubbish, it’s just nice to crawl out of a big old rut and do something. Anything. Even if it is, indeed, quite rubbish.

Living in Britain has become embarrassing. To be fair, it’s been embarrassing for a quite a while already. I’d say, and don’t quote me on this, that Britain has been struggling since roughly half way through the Blair years, when the sheen of his grin had started to wear off and the economy was inevitably beginning to droop; just like the time before that and the time before that. Cool Britannia had turned out to be a misadventure in coke-fuelled marketing and suddenly we lived in a country where Chris Evans was more valuable than Jesus. Now, I’m no Jesus fan but surely we can all see he’s still a lot more useful to mankind than Chris Evans ever was. All this considered I didn’t really notice the decline and fall back whenever it was, because I was in my youth and too stupid to appreciate the benefits of hindsight and perspective. Before you say it, I’m still spectacularly stupid, but I do at least have the memories of all (well, most of) the moments when Britain still seemed, if not necessarily great, then certainly like an improvement on, as they say, the now. It’s interesting, that concept of mindfulness and of being “in the now”, which is blown up to be a real gift for the ages but (like all the other gifts) is essentially a fart-filled nothing of a name for being slightly more conscious than someone lying on the floor of a crack den in a less fortunate corner of Birmingham. Only humans could invent mindfulness just in time for there to be nothing left worth being mindful about.

And speaking of Birmingham (a seamless link, it took me minutes, you’re very welcome), well that fair city seems to sum up rather nicely all the bother we’re in. Because sometimes it isn’t about international trade and far off wars, VAT and hospital waiting hours, celebrity suicide and knife crime, it’s all just about a huge pile of shit. In case you’ve been too busy to notice, chiefly because you don’t live there and therefore don’t really care, the streets of Britain’s second biggest city are filling up with walls of refuse and legions of rats and everyone seems to want to blame everyone else rather than find a solution to the problem (hint: it won’t find itself). For a start, it doesn’t help that Birmingham City council are already up to their necks in a toxic mixture of debt and slurry and that when people start to see a weakness they are bound to exploit it. It could have been the bus drivers or the teachers or the fatberg blasters, but this time it’s the bin men, sorry, bin people (you can’t say bin men any more because it’s sexist or something, though in fairness I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bin lady in my entire life and for all I know the waste disposal industry could be Britain’s biggest non-binary employer after Starbucks). Apparently they don’t get paid enough and they must truly believe this because despite a series of “fair” offers by the council they’re not backing down. It might just be me but surely if the bin people get their way there will be more and more trade unions asking for more and more money which will put so much pressure on the council that everything will shut down anyway because there won’t be enough cash for anyone to get paid, ever. And that’ll learn everyone, won’t it?

I don’t know how much bin people get paid but I’m going to guess that it’s more than I would automatically assume. It’ll probably be like London Underground train drivers, who get paid a fortune to flip a few levers and brandish the expression of someone who has just been told their (massive) house has been burnt to the ground with their children inside. Of course, it’s also hard to know how much bin people deserve to be paid, because whilst on the one hand they do do us the rather substantial service of taking all our rubbish away on the other hand they not only seem incapable of returning each bin to within a fifty yard radius of where they found it but also of doing this without shouting about it at just after six on a Tuesday morning. There is that old saying – “where there’s muck there’s brass” – so I’m going to assume that bin people can’t be doing too badly, and if we’ve all been asked to tighten our belts (thanks to Rachel Reeves’ new economic plan to grind us into the concrete so we can appreciate how hard Angela Rayner’s childhood was) then this means so should they. And besides, the bin people may look and smell like they work with tonnes of waste every day but it doesn’t mean they can’t scrub up better after work. Perhaps it’s all a scam.

As ever, we’ve got to accept that there are other human beings involved here as well. We keep getting told that back in the day nothing went to waste and that many a mickle make a muckle and that waste not want not and all that other stuff that no longer applies. We know that in the 1920’s poor folk would happily make coffee out of coal dust and that in the 1620’s lower class scum would use their neighbours’ toenails as toothpicks and that in the 1420’s many peasants were very content to consist on a diet of shit sandwiches (the real thrill being not knowing exactly who’s shit it was) but these days (yes, I’m talking about these days now) most people don’t even look at what they’ve got before they giddily shove it in a bin bag and go and get a new one anyway. It’s because people say they don’t know how to recycle properly or that they’re not sure where to shove it (a few suggestions spring to mind) or that there is too much packaging or that they’re students and are fucking idiots or that where else do you expect them to put three dozen shitted nappies every week? And due to this apathy, this indifference, this confusion – or should we call it what it is: flat out bastard laziness – the streets of Birmingham are getting buried under bags of filth and they just don’t seem to be coping.

You see, what all this needs is some common sense, it just depends on whether you go hard or soft. Going hard would involve sacking all the bin people and hiring anyone who really wants a job to get the rubbish instead. Or you could get the army in and visit the house of every bin person and fire waste through their letterboxes until they gave up the fight. Alternatively you could hire a production crew and make a series of handy public information videos showing people how to make the most of the things they would normally chuck away. I would happily listen to Kirsty Allsopp explain how to recycle condoms into party balloons (it doesn’t leave much to the imagination, but it does require someone with a good pair of lungs to do the dirty work), or let Stacey Solomon show us how to turn those shitted nappies into a charming patchwork quilt for Grandma when the winter fuel payments get cancelled, or watch Prue Leith gagging her way through a bowl of sturdy broth made from three week old curry “leftovers”. Within days the streets would be clear (provided martial law was engaged to shoot all and any opportunistic fly-tippers – a law that I would vote for whether Birmingham was swimming in its own mess or not) and all we’d need to do then is find a solution for the rat problem, though I’m very happy with the idea of putting them all in Sir Keir Starmer’s house for the time being (though to prove I’m not being politically bias there should be enough to fill Kemi and Sir Ed’s gaff’s too). I have a feeling that rats and politicians should get on rather well, like a pile of rubbish on fire.

G B Burton. 15.04.2025