Lost and Found.

They say that if you love something you should set it free. And if it returns it’ll be yours forever.

I’m starting to find that this may actually be true.

If by ‘love’ they mean ‘are quite used to having around’. And if by ‘quite used to having around’ they mean ‘is a District Council-mandated necessity’.

And if by ‘set it free’ they actually mean ‘wonder where the fuck it’s gone.’

The wheelie-bin for my recycling went missing didn’t it.

The first week or so I wasn’t that bothered. It’s a recycling bin that - to be frank - I rarely use. I chucked my tins and newspapers in the refuse bin as usual but without the normal minor twinge you get when you irrationally think that you are being ‘bad’ by doing so. The second week I did have a faux-nonchalant stroll around the neighbourhood to see if I could spot it. By week three I was beginning to get slightly concerned.

It just isn’t in a wheelie-bins’ nature to act like this. I began to imagine how it would have coped surviving in the wild for three solid weeks. The torments it must have suffered at the hands of the abandoned shopping-trolleys, the mocking from the single drunkedly-lost shoes and discarded gloves.

Don’t get me started on the indignity it must have suffered at the hands of the marauding ‘Household Refuse’ wheelie-bins. Because they think they are IT compared with their weakling ‘Recycling’ cousins - showing off with their cigarette-ends and bits of chicken wing when they all get together in the grave-yard at night for a bit of lid-flapping.

By week four it had returned, sheepish and repentant. Well, it won’t be trying that one again. I’m never putting it out. That’ll teach it. Locked in the backyard, next to the catflap in the back gate that I spend most evenings staking-out so I can throw clothes-pegs at next-doors’ cat every time it sticks it’s fucking head through it.

People tell me I’m spending too much time in the house.