Our wheelie bin was stolen the other day. ‘How rude!’, I thought when I ventured out to locate the nearest one on our Georgian square in my leopard print dressing gown (I think stylish, my housemates think more Doreen from Birds of a Feather). I tiptoed to the next wheelie bin, which was only three metres up the street, on the logical presumption the bin men may have pushed ours along slightly. I was then caught red-handed dropping a small Morrisons bag into what transpired to be, yes, our neighbours’ bin. The prim blonde lady who lives at No. 3 was standing at her front door. I caught her eye as the lid went down and said: ‘Oh, I’m sorry, is this…..’, ‘Our bin?’, she replied haughtily. ‘Yes’. She then strode towards her car, head tossed back, nose in the air. As I shuffled behind attempting to politely explain our dilemma, and the mysterious loss of our bin, she more or less ignored me as if I was someone trying to sell her hideous-looking dressing gowns. Or Immodium. She was not interested. We had dumped our small sack of waste in her dust-bin and despite the genuine error, this was crossing the neighbourly line.
However, on returning to the house I felt mightily indignant. ‘She was not neighbourly!’, I fumed to one sympathetic housemate as I peered like a mad woman out of the window. ‘I am going to go and find our bin’, I declared, striding out into the perilous world again. But on circling the square with the venom and frazzled appearance of a jilted Miss Havisham, I could not find our green wheelie-bin. We would have to order another one.
Glamourpuss
The next day there was a BIG development in the wheelie-bin saga. Our neighbour on the other side – nice, sprightly-looking septuagenarian with rimless glasses – passed me and I mentioned our bin issue. ‘Our bin was also stolen two weeks ago’, he comiserated, shaking his head. ‘Oh!’, I exclaimed, feeling less of a victim now we were one of many. ‘Poor you.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we had to order another bin from the council which didn’t come for ten days’. ‘So you must have found it tough during that time, not having a bin, what did you do?’ I asked. ‘Oh, we put our rubbish in your bin’, he said grinning.
Now this made me genuinely glad. Gleeful, even. I had not been a bad neighbour for accidentally plopping our rubbish in No. 3’s bin. I told the nice man from No. 1 that this was absolutely no problem, we were glad to be of service, and naturally we would be very grateful if he could return the favour. He of course obliged.
Returning home with this breaking news, I told my housemate Susi who had been following the saga: ‘Perhaps, I could go round to No. 3 and say that I thought it would be neighbourly to warn her of the bin thieves in the area.’ Susi looked at me, I thought at first empathetically, and said gently: ‘I think you need a new hobby Kat’.
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