Just-Jake (keeping all my balls in the air)

Going to the tip is quite an experience. It is round here anyway. Gone are the days you simply nipped down there with your bags of unwanteds, flung them into a huge green container to be churned up and squashed into a chunk small enough to be popped in the land fill, and drove out again without a backward glance.

These days it's a saga... a real production, and if I may say - quite an event. We went last week. Went the week before too as a matter of fact, so you can see that I speak from experience. We are becoming veteran tip go'ers, and the more I go, the more I get my eyes opened to the whole experience...

See, it seems there are tip go'ers and tip go'ers. There are people like us.... got a car full of odds and ends, the product of a decorating job, or a spending spree, or a bit of a spring clean... downsizers maybe - but ordinary folk whichever way you look at us... and then there are ... them.

'They' are the others. The people who think they have an affinity with the tip, and feel it is their life's mission to initiate obvious novices like us in 'how things work' round there....

And indeed, one actually said that to me last week....

" been here before have you? " he said, as I reached in my fiesta's boot for a bit more MDf to fling into the gaping mouth of the cruncher...

"Sorry?" I mumbled. My mind was on the job in hand . I wasn't actually looking to make a friend tbh, but not wishing to be rude I said vaguely that I'd been once or twice - I didn't want him assuming I hung out there all the time, after all...

He was surprised, he said, that I didn't know how it worked then....

" say what...?" I looked around... where the hell was Carlos... why was he never around when I got accosted by nutters...

"you're not doing it right..." says my new best friend.

"you have to follow the rules..."

RULES??

there's RULES to dumping RUBBISH?

Apparently so.

Cardboard in the cardboard place.
Shoes in the shoe place - but only if they're paired.
Boxes emptied of polystyrene.... metal stripped off chipboard furniture - and don't you dare be seen throwing anything in the wrong place! Wood to the wood - NO! Not that MDF - that's not wood!
blankets separated from towels, Men's from women's...Yea God's! What next - clothes separated by colour? All of this is being recycled - can't we give someone a job sorting them - must I sort it all myself beforehand?

Then there are the drips... Bloody Hell! Don't start me on those. I sat for 19 minutes behind a guy who folded... folded, every piece of cardboard into the tiniest, neatest squares before gently placing them in size order into the machine that was going to turn them into squishy pulp.......

Just tell me how I manage in one weekend to meet and get lectured by Mr TidyTip himself, and also to find myself stuck behind the greenest and most anally retentive twat in Bedfordshire... and all before me bacon sarnie???

Thing is....I have to go back... maybe tomorrow.. or if not,then on Sunday for certain....

I am twitching already.