Bins

They stand like sentries on our front paving. Bins. The blue one is for paper and cardboard. The brown one is for glass, cans and plastic bottles. The charcoal grey bin is for general household waste.

The charcoal grey bin is collected by the local council every two weeks. The blue bin is emptied every four weeks and so is the brown bin. A few people in our street have large green bins too. These are for garden waste. You have to pay an annual fee for the green bins and they are emptied six times outside winter months.

I don't know how it is in other countries but in England household waste and recycling collections vary from city to city and from region to region. It is very frustrating. There should be commonality driven by government.

As well as the three "official" bins we have two more bins at the front of our house. Here they are:-

We have been using them for more than a decade now. I bought them myself. You are probably intrigued. What on earth do The Puddings put in those bins? Well let me take one of the lids off and show you:-

It's all the plastic waste that we are not allowed to put in the brown bin. Instead of chucking this in the general household waste bin, we collect it and then when the two bins are full I take them to one of our large local supermarkets where there are skips into which you can toss such waste. Most homeowners don't bother. They dispose of it in their charcoal-grey bins.

When Clint and I take our round bins, I make sure that it is as part of a shopping expedition. Just a short diversion. After all, it wouldn't make sense to use precious petrol just for a recycling trip. That would be something of an ironic contradiction.

There are a four rambling points I would like to make about those excess plastic bins:-

1) Local councils should be collecting all plastics - not just plastic bottles. I should not have to be going to all this trouble - month in, month out.

2) It's not clear what happens to waste plastic. Where does it end up? I don't want it to travel to Indonesia or Sri Lanka or China on ships. There should be full-scale recycling facilities closer to home. Has all our effort been in vain?

3) Local councils and their profiteering waste sub-contractors should be transparent about their procedures. They should be clarifying what can and can't be collected and explaining, for example, what is meant by "contamination".

4) Supermarkets and the businesses that supply supermarkets with products should be making a much bigger effort to reduce the enormous amounts of waste plastic that they are effectively responsible for creating.  It should not all be about making profit - there should be environmental  responsibility and action too - and definitely not just a bunch of empty words - paying lipservice to recycling.

Recently, the great David Attenborough was asked by a child if he would like to give people a message about the perilous state of our planet and his response was simply this: "Don't waste anything...Don’t waste electricity, don’t waste paper, don’t waste food. Live the way you want to live but just don’t waste".

It's a good message but we all need help to make it happen. We cannot do it on our own.

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Love This

My hero, and so true

 

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Mastery

 It's a day

of classical music

to soothe 

what ails

While taking

a journey

back to

The Hapsburgs day

talent for days

and an appreciation

for cultural

and artistic mastery

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Lord

 Lord 

I’m here

At the only

Feet

That leave

Me still

Even as 

My mind

Spins

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Good

 COVID 

Thank you 

For forcing me

To use my imagination 

If you don’t use it

You lose it

Before 

You know it

Thanks

Breeds

The good

My soul needs

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Velvet Voiced Linda

 The Trelawnyd Street Wardens have been given notice of the impending lockdown by the ever gracious Velvet Voiced Linda . You can just make her out far left on the front row, her fashionable pant leg sidewards at a jaunty angle.

Even though, the initiative wasn’t only her idea, VVL made the whole thing work and she did it with diplomacy and a voice like chocolate. 

These things seldom work without good leadership and at the original meeting there was many ideas thrown about, several of them not always constructive. But Linda ran with the good ones, commanded warmth and respect and got things done.

Not an easy job I can tell you.

In any forum 

Not everyone in the village gets on. 

Of course that’s a given, what with petty jealousies, power struggles and a previous middle aged patriarchy , and to be honest there is at least one person who I know hates my guts with blind testosterone and Mucho gusto!

I don’t care, as I know I am a person who speaks his mind, 

It sometimes goes with the territory of being gobby and gay

But.....if I am being honest the feeling is bloody mutual...and is one stoked by petty behaviours witnessed when I was more at the front line of village activities....

Not quite the chocolate box village I often portray eh

But a very normal one, truth be told.

The decision making for Trelawnyd by Trelawnyd people is now much more diverse and eclectic

And that can only be a good thing. The community Council and the village association now run side by side which is healthy and with these and Linda’s wardens flexing their muscles, ready for a second wave we have good people prepared to fight the good fight

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Autumn

The winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature was the American poetess, Louise Glück (b. 1943). In the awarding committee's citation, they said this: "Louise Glück is not only engaged by the errancies and shifting conditions of life, she is also a poet of radical change and rebirth, where the leap forward is made from a deep sense of loss". 

The Irish writer and critic Colm Tóibín said of her, "It is difficult to think of another living poet whose voice contains so much electrifying undercurrent, whose rhythms are under such control, but whose work is also so exposed and urgent".

Here's a typical example of Louise Glück's work:-

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Autumn
by Louise Glück

The part of life
devoted to contemplation
was at odds with the part
committed to action.

       *

Fall was approaching.
But I remember
it was always approaching
once school ended.

                            *

Life, my sister said,
is like a torch passed now
from the body to the mind.
Sadly, she went on, the mind is not
there to receive it.


The sun was setting.
Ah, the torch, she said.
It has gone out, I believe.
Our best hope is that it’s flickering,
fort/da, fort/da, like little Ernst
throwing his toy over the side of his crib
and then pulling it back. It’s too bad,
she said, there are no children here.
We could learn from them, as Freud did.

                         *

We would sometimes sit
on benches outside the dining room.
The smell of leaves burning.

Old people and fire, she said.
Not a good thing. They burn their houses down.

       *

How heavy my mind is,
filled with the past.
Is there enough room
for the world to penetrate?
It must go somewhere,
it cannot simply sit on the surface—

       *

Stars gleaming over the water.
The leaves piled, waiting to be lit.

       *

Insight, my sister said.
Now it is here.
But hard to see in the darkness.

You must find your footing
before you put your weight on it.

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If you have got this far, what is your response to Louise Glück's poem?

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