Saving Your Rubbish

Saving Your Rubbish ©

By Michael Casey

I was  thinking about what to talk about tonight when my eye fell on a bag of rubbish ready for our recycle bin, so I thought that’s a good idea. Recycling is a new thing, when I grew up all the rubbish went into our 2 metal dustbins, and once a week the singing binmen would arrive up our entry and hoist the heavy bin on their shoulder and tip it into the dustcart in the street, before returning with the empty bin.

 There was noise and gaiety about them, like a happy invading army.  This was in the days before people locked and bolted their entries with an extra door at the street side of the entry. It was in the days when there was a rat a tac tac  on the back door and a door to door salesman would try and sell you something from a suitcase. I seem to remember my mum bought a clothes brush to clean the fluff our clothes.

Funny how these memories rise from the brain all because I look at the bag of rubbish ready for the recycling bin. What I really want to talk about is Saving  Your Rubbish, not recycling but saving it. You know some save wrapping paper as it’s too good to throw away, which is great so long as you don’t use it to cover a present back to the person who gave you a present.

Wrapping paper can be used to cover exercise books, making them really funky. You could even use it to wallpaper a small room, a study perhaps, the average “study” is only 8 x 6, or the really small 3rd bedroom in some houses, I know because I’m watching the property market in the vain hope of finding something nice and affordable. You could end up with a spaceship look, all silver paper on the walls, which reminds me I actually did that once on the girls’ bedroom.

Back to the my rubbish, I have to admit I am a hoarder, I’ll save plastic bags from stuff I’ve bought, you can always use a plastic bag, either for your shopping in future, or a little plastic bag can be used to seal the remote control in, thus saving it from all manner of pizza and Heinz tomato ketchup, and fizzy drinks. See you’ll all be covering your remote controls now.

My wife unleashed a fancy mop thing today so I found a plastic bag to keep the mop head under control after she’d  finished using it. Mind you some plastic bags are just too small to use, so they go in the recycle bin. 40 years ago maybe my mother once was cleaning our drains, which we shared with the house next door, as they were blocked and our local plumber was too lazy to come and assist.

 I can remember her with her arm down the drain as far as her elbow and beyond, then suddenly lots and lots of small plastic bags appeared. She removed them from the drain and the drain was free again, mum wondered what all the little plastic bags were, she did not know what they were, she was a mother of six. I can also remember her washing her arm in our kitchen sink with dad pouring Jeyes Fluid all over her arm. Jeyes Fluid being the strongest disinfectant there is in England, its thick as browny/black and it goes “glug” as you pour it, rather like cough syrup for drains.

Paint brushes used to be saved as well, in an old coffee jar full of water, they would be left behind the garden shed to rot, we were always disappointed that we needed to go down the road to the DIY shop to replace them many many months later. Nowadays I’ll buy brushes from the Pound Shop and just throw them away.  Which is what we did recently after a friend finished painting the bathroom for us.

There are other things that we save, old clothes that we have grown out of, the girls’ clothes for example, they cannot be throw away as granny in Shanghai has sent them over. Finally the clothes are, free at last, free at last, I bag them up in some of the plastic bags that I save and live in a hippy commune under kitchen sink, and then I give them away. I either leave them on the garden wall or I’ll stand guard until I spot a family with children, then like a rabid dog clown, I’ll bounce out and insist that these clothes are great and they really should have them.

In actual fact the girls’ clothes are really nice with little wear on them, so its nice that another child gets to enjoy them. Remember I am a gay dad and I have picked some of their clothes, for my Singapore and Russian readers, I am not gay, it’s a figure of speech, it means I know about Fashion, with 3 girls in the house and a female cat it was inevitable.

Besides I am  just too ugly to be gay, dressing up in women’s clothing, now that’s another matter,  but I’ve side-tracked myself. I hope you can keep with the chain of thought, otherwise you must have a really strange view of me as I sit here talking to you, I’m sure some of you are thinking if you ever come to England you’ll stay as far away as possible from me and Birmingham.  

It’s getting late so I need to finish now, but one thing that I save most of all is my Memory, my stories from my extended life. Extended life because without the Unplanned Quadruple heart bypass, I wouldn’t be sat here talking to the World. So its nearly 2 years of extra time, a Manchester United mach would give you 30 mins, and be far more interesting I know, but I do have more hair than Rooney, and one day I’ll put him in a story and he’ll say I’m going to buy a dictionary.

Its when a really posh woman crushes the French and curses them in totally obscene French for not respecting Big Sid the Butcher the man who saved her daughter, you’ll have to wait until Tears for a Butcher is written. If Rupert Murdoch ever reads this, can you send me a tape recorder or a Legal Secretary and I could get it all down on paper in 12 weeks. See it’s nice to have dreams, to have something for the future, saving your “rubbish” which one day might be useful, if only to entertain the kids on a rainy day. A story is life, its fun, it should be shared, for it is our own individual beating heart.