Ah yes I remember now. The economics of rubbish. As soon as you have a van it becomes very expensive to throw anything away.
We loaded up with a whole damn ton of timber. Massive unwieldy flats with cupboards and electrics embedded in them. It was a squeeze getting them all into the back of the Luton, especially considering I was hung-over. Then we drove to Leyton Bywaters. Too big to transfer into a car or carry them in. We were paying tip-weight however we tried to spin it.
Huge open air piles, where trucks are tipping their backs up and unloading so much stuff willy nilly to be compacted by machines. The air is filled with particles. As we approach in the van, a little bit of tape spool blows across the road in the shifting winter wind. Without the benefit of storage and time we had to send the flats quickly back out of the van. Hopefully the wood will be salvaged. Hopefully there’ll be some use for it. It felt terrifically wasteful, but anybody who knows me will understand how I much prefer to try and reuse things than to buy them new. We hurled it all into the anomalous pile.
A literal ton, and with VAT they expect close to £200 just to give us a place to get rid of it. At that rate you can see why fly-tipping in the countryside is such a terrible problem. If you’re broke and you credit card rented a van for a day to take a load of rubble out of your basement, and then you get told that you’ll be paying £180 a ton with a minimum of £90 – I can see why you might be tempted to sling the stuff into a layby and make it somebody else’s problem. And it’s doubly galling when much of the stuff is decent. That was good wood. Gone now. Good throwing-away practice. I’m still terrible at it.
By the time I got home I was exhausted. I’ve picked up a cough somewhere – perhaps the dust in the warehouse. I was coughing before we even got to the dump. Not likely to be Covid if I’ve just come out of it. But I’m in bed now and it’s barely ten. Gonna get some rest.
Another big load tomorrow, this time mostly antique brown furniture that isn’t good enough to sell. That and large damp antique books, and silver plate candlesticks. Things that have found their way into the Christmas Carol stable over the years and have no value. I’m going to try to avoid tipping them as for one month every year they are golden. But they all have to be somewhere else by the end of tomorrow. I’m leaving nothing but the water tank of doom. The heaviest single object on the planet. I have no idea how that’s gonna move. There’s a forklift right next to it and I was gonna work out how to operate the thing, but apparently it’s already broken which saves me doing it by mistake. That’s for tomorrow. For tonight, rest and coughing…
AlBarclay 