A trip to the tip

With excess cardboard to dispose of after our goods from India had been unpacked, I took Shilpi and the children for an outing to our local dump. I'm good like that. We strapped the kids into the back of the car, filled the boot with flattened cardboard boxes, and then sped off to the municipal tip.

It was around 10am on a Sunday morning and there was already a queue. I supposes it gets worse later on when the car boot sales close and people come and get rid of their unwanted tat. In any event, we weren't there for very long, probably about five minutes, if that. But in the time it took us to unload the cardboard and dump it into the cardboard-only skip, we saw the following items being crushed:

1. A sofa
2. An armchair
3. Hi-Fi separates - amp, CD player, cassette deck
4. A coffee table
5. Cupboards
6. Carpets
7. A double mattress

In fact there was enough stuff trashed in that short time that we were there, to set up a new home. It actually made me slightly ashamed to be throwing away cardboard boxes. Seeing what everybody else was dumping I felt somewhat guilty that I wasn't throwing out a chaise-longue, or that old Chippendale chair that had been in the shed.

After our furniture arrived from India I donated the stand-in dining room suite that we'd been using, back to the second-hand charity shop that I'd bought it from for £40 eight weeks earlier. I also gave them a couple of items of Indian furniture, shipped five thousand miles and at some cost, and now on offer in an Essex junk shop. We did wonder why the people who were dumping their furniture hadn't given it to charity instead. Probably they couldn't be bothered or maybe, like me when I'd phoned our local hospice shop earlier, they'd been told , "sorry, but we're not taking mahogany."

It's all a far cry from India where everything has a re-sale value - even those things that you wouldn't normally think of re-selling. We had people almost killing each other for our seven year old mattress and here in Essex, better-looking bedding was just being chucked away. I'm sure that most self-respecting Indians, being the natural businessmen that they are, could have made good money out of that tip had they been given the chance to set up stall there. As it was, there was a lot of very good looking and serviceable product simply being ground to dust.

Mine, all mine

Chilean miners? Aren'tcha sick of 'em? I mean, I'm glad that they're being winched out of their tomb, but I'm even more glad there are only 33 of them and not a hundred and thirty-three. As it is, virtually every news channel seems to have had its cameras pointed at that dusty hole, whilst the reporters have been desperately trying to fill air-time with potted biographies of the men and the family. At times, it felt a little like one of those awful game shows, Chile's Got Talent, or similar.

"Yes, here we are at the dusty hole in some god-forsaken spot in Chile. The next miner up, we hear, will be Pedro Amigo who has been a miner for seven years. He is one of thirteen children - unlucky for some, eh Pedro - and his hobbies are football and tennis. At least, those were his hobbies. Of late, his hobbies have been, eye-spy (something beginning with R - ROCK! Darn! Your go...) and sleeping..."

Sky News even had some idiot psychologist sitting in the studio, talking us through the miners' first moments as they arrived back on the surface:

"Well yes, he'll be feeling delighted right now [as the miner punches the air, whoops and salutes the crowd] whereas this man [cut to a miner kneeling and praying] is just thankful to God for being alive. This man, on the other hand, is a little emotional because he's been buried in a hole in the ground for over two months [cut to miner weeping]."

Well thank you, Mr Miner-Psychologist, for those deep and telling insights. You know, despite all the coverage of these poor chaps; the personal stories, the little details about how they're coping with being banged up with each other for weeks on end, not one news channel has, as far as I know, told us what we really want to know, the answer to that six million dollar question: where have the miners been taking a dump? I mean, of course they HAVE to go somewhere, and yet nobody has covered that angle - and after two months and thirty three bottoms, that will be quite some angle.

I guess we'll just have to wait for the Hollywood film to find out the answers to that one: Tom Cruise as the leading miner and Bruce Willis as the man in charge of the rescue team. You know, I could really see Tom Cruise doing that leaping about bit when he reaches the surface. Well anyway, let's hope there will be a film, and a book deal and endorsements of Homebase special Chilean gravel "because there's nothing miner about DIY", after all, these guys need a break.

Daft

I watched one of those much beloved Police documentaries last night. They’re much beloved by the TV stations because they afford cheap entertainment, by the police because they get the chance to show how great they are, and by the viewers because we’re all spitting feathers at the arrogance of our boys in blue. The irony of it all is that the police really haven’t got the faintest idea that they are being smug. And so last night we saw two of England’s finest stopping a cyclist who had ridden through a red light in the small hours of the morning. They eventually got him for:

• Running a red light
• Riding without lights
• Riding on the pavement
• Obstructing the police

They also accused him of being drunk which may or may not have been the case. In any event, he was a good deal more erudite than the two policemen, especially when he asked them, incredulously, whether they didn’t have anything better to do at 1am on a Saturday morning, than arguing the toss with him about such a petty matter. It was all to no avail. The cyclist was subsequently fined a whopping great £700 with £200 costs. And didn’t that make the police feel smug.

It was daftness of a darker kind later on Channel 4 with a documentary about a US Army Company in Afghanistan. I only caught the tail end of it but I did manage to see the bit where a group of sheepish US marines, presented an Afghan man with $10,000 as compensation for the four family members they’d accidentally killed the previous day. It was surreal television, the soldiers sitting shamefaced before the stunned Afghan; a much older man sitting cross-legged next to him, silently weeping and wiping away the tears. The American soldiers didn’t want to be there and the Afghanistan people certainly didn’t want to be there. We were treated to US marines who were genuinely proud of a mosque they’d helped build, while the indigenous population smiled politely and then said to the cameras that they simply just wanted them to get the hell out.

Finally, tattoos. I’ve never felt the slightest inclination to have somebody stick needles into me and scar me for life and so I personally can’t understand why anybody would want to brand themselves, especially as so much of the branding is so unoriginal – cobwebs on the elbows, LOVE and HATE on the knuckles. I mean, if you have to write on your hands wouldn’t it be more useful, for instance, to tattoo 1 2 3 4 5 and 6 7 8 9 10 to save you the bother of counting on your fingers? Or perhaps, F*** and C***, so that you can wave the F*** hand in the air when you stub your toe, and the C*** hand when you’re waving to a policeman.

On my way into work this morning, a girl cycled past me who had half a dozen stars tattooed on her calf. I mean, what’s the point of that? And that’s the other thing about tattooed Brits, they love to show off their artwork. So it can be freezing cold, or pouring with rain, and yet somebody will still cycle past you in shorts because they want you to see their calf stars. Like I say, daft.