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.