Garbage.

How a brushed stainless steel bin could cause quite as much discord as it did Hubby will never know, but as I lobbed a sizeable, wooden pepper mill in his direction he quickly realised that criticising the aforementioned bin was reckless. Nothing is ever as it seems though is it? As far as Hubby was concerned, it just wasn’t the one he had hankered after i.e a plastic Addis swing lid, where the liner is easily removed. By dismissing it though he had not considered the care and aggravation that had gone into choosing such a receptacle...
Very early on Monday morning, just before the rubbish went out, I was fed up that another recently bought stainless steel bin had broken. This meant that far from depressing the little button on the lid which in turn made the lid spring up, the lid was up permanently as the catch had sheared off. Not only was this unsightly given the number of children who scrape their leftovers into it after every meal but with a dog in the house it was a nightmare for us and a constant, open ended buffet for the dog.
“That’s it”, I said as I grappled with the bin liner, the dog’s nose impeding my efforts and in the ensuing scuffle, the bin liner broke open resulting in detritus littering the kitchen floor much to the dog’s unconfined joy, “We’ll have to get another bin again”. Hubby, who was about to leave for work would only add this nugget of advice, “Get something that is easy to put rubbish into and out of”. Cheers.
No sooner had I literally put the dog in the aptly named dog house and bleached the floor; I turned to my computer for suggestions as to which was the best bin for the Band family. Argos was the place. It offered me scores of variations on a theme, one of which opened as if by magic when you approached it. Whilst this sounded terribly sexy and ultra modern, I could only imagine that it would end in disaster by a) The children approaching it too slowly, whereby the bin lid would become impatient and shut again just as two or three of them huddled over it scraping spaghetti Bolognese over its now resolutely shut domed lid and thus onto my floor and b) The dog, who is exceptionally intelligent would probably work out that contrary to the children, if he approached the bin fast enough the lid would stay open long enough for him to launch himself into the air and land snout first into God knows what. I rejected the idea immediately.
What we needed was something that wasn’t too much of an eye sore, was easy to clean, had a large capacity for garbage and was cheap. Like I said, Argos was the place. Luckily for me, the children and I had to be in Liskeard by eight thirty that morning for a dental check-up, so I reserved my shiny new bin, wrote the reservation number on my notebook i.e the back of my hand and, after a lot of shouting, shooing, cajoling and bribery, finally got all of us in the car. Thankfully all teeth were deemed to be pearls and after a mad dash around Morrison’s for basic staples, I drove across the roundabout and picked up my bin. Dropping the youngest at their school, I proceeded to the ferry to drop the other two.
“Aw Mum!” moaned my son, “There’s no point going to school now is there? I might as well wait until after break”. My eldest daughter muttered something in agreement but I for once unwavering and desperate to play with my new bin, kicked them out, deaf to the loud protestations that double chemistry, much as it did in my day, sucks.
The dog was very excited by the new arrival and was more than happy to help me dispose of the packaging although I would have liked the polystyrene to have gone in the recycling bin and not as it ended up being, sprinkled like spring snow, all around the garden.
There is a marvellous machine in IKEA that demonstrates how good a specific chair is by robotically repeating how much being sat on the chair can withstand. Millions of times from what I’ve seen, because every time I visit IKEA the same chair and the same robot are still going at it hammer and tong.
I decided to conduct my own experiment and having chosen a foot-pedal operating receptacle, pressed my foot on said pedal over and over again. By the time the kettle had boiled, the pedal had given up the ghost and whilst it was more than happy to be trodden on, the lid staunchly refused to open. Swearing very loudly, I put the bin back in the box, now devoid of any packaging, chucked the dog in the boot and returned to Liskeard. Alas on the A38, just beyond the notorious toilets in fact, there was almighty noise from under the car. Swearing once again, I pulled over and peered under the engine bit and there, as I have since found out, was the ‘belly tray’, half off, no longer protecting my undercarriage but pretending it was a snow plough instead.
“Dawg gone”, or some such cuss escaped from my mouth and I considered my options. Hubby was at sea and besides, he isn’t exactly your man’s man when it comes to things like this and the AA would take hours. Nope. There was only one man for the job. Me. Within an hour I’d removed the offending article, returned to Argos to change my ruddy bin and driven home again.Had Hubby been aware of the tribulations endured to buy the thing, he would not have been as quick to damn it, nor would he have several peppercorns tattooed into his sternum.