Toxic Waste

By Mortimer Ribbons

It’s too dark to get up in December, and the Bells are Jingling ever closer. Decency prevents me from using the actual C-word, but levels of panic are rising.

It’s every-other-Friday today, so I’d better locate the garden waste. I missed Recycling on Tuesday, and am still unsure about Hazardous Waste day. They never had this problem in the old days: things just decomposed. They’d look in the chest and find the bloody moths had eaten last year’s loincloth, and their armour had rusted away again. However valuable a thing might be, it could never last forever unless it was made of gold – in which case it would probably get nicked because there wasn’t enough to go round.

Then, less than a hundred years ago, we discovered a substance that could be buried for millennia without breaking down. Moth and rust could not corrupt it… and we decided to use it to make disposable cups, bags to use only once, and impermeable nappies in which to entomb our baby shit until the end of time. On the fashion front we made flared polyester trousers and shirts with silly collars with which to puzzle archaeologists of the distant future, and we racked our brains for anything at all that could be made from this everlasting substance and then thrown away.

Now the world is full of it and we’re wondering what happened. There’s an African state, apparently, where you can’t see the floor anymore for old plastic bags, most of them leaking excrement. In the tomb of one of the Pharoahs I saw a casket in an alcove, and someone had tossed in an old Evian bottle. It made me realise the Ancient Egyptians might have had a good innings, but they won’t last as long as a plastic bottle.

I’m happy to give Gordon 500% tax on petrol to stop global warming, and to leave my cardboard out in the rain to support the Council’s efforts at recycling. But I sometimes wonder if it’s really going to work. I once saw a road gang in Sri Lanka. The monsoon had washed away a section of road large enough to lose an elephant in, and a dozen ladies in saris, with woks full of rocks on their heads, were working away with little toffee hammers while more ladies boiled up pans of pitch. I tried to calculate how many inches per month they’d need to achieve before the rains came again, and I get the same sad feeling with recycling. Supermarkets everywhere are churning out cubic acres of pointless packaging. All in different types of plastic so it can’t be recycled.

Why is this allowed? The answer lies in the official world – the true world of clean lines and clear outcomes that exists on paper – where nothing is what it seems, and the tail can always wag the dog. Here we find that we need more supermarkets because they create valuable opportunities in the packaging industry. Midda may have been stopped from turning the Vortex into a Tesco Metro but we’re getting one on the High Street instead. Various Ministers of War have pointed out that there are more people working for Tesco now than there are troops in the army, navy and air force combined. So I think the plan may be to send a newly trained force of grocers to Basra. They’ll tie up Al Quaida with loyalty cards and surplus packaging while we bring our Brave Boys back home to liberate our High Streets. 

I am much reassured by a new report that the UK is not the miserable place previously thought in the previous report, and is a wonderful place to grow up in, after all. The kids on the council estates are all well and happy now, except when they get shot dead. The Minister of Fish has explained that the way to preserve fish stocks is to catch more of them, and experts say the new runway at Heathrow will produce hardly any more CO2 than Kenya does. A spokesman has assured us that Africa is miles away and the extra runway capacity will actually decrease noise and air pollution for lucky local residents.

Local architects here have explained to the grateful denizens of Arbor Court that the erection of a block of flats in Avigdor school playground will hardly ruin their lives at all, and will actually improve the flow of traffic on Lordship Park. Further experts will shortly show that turning a house on our street into a restaurant will help us with our noise, refuse and parking problems. As for the ‘Area of Exception’ around Stamford Hill, it now turns out that it never existed, and all the ink on all the official documents will shortly fade away. As will all our surplus pounds! Because our new Leisure centre is about to open!!

It’s been decided to hold back on Hack cards (like the Izz cards for Islington residents) because we’re still reeling from the Customs and Revenue data spillage. Technology is such a double-edged sword. To lose this much data in the old days you’d have needed a whole fleet of junior officials to leave entire filing cabinets on the bus. Even our shop has found its way onto some database of Easy-to-Intimidate Businesses. They want to charge us for playing records in the shop, and the only way to avoid it is to play privately recorded CDs instead. We’re building up a good collection from local bands, but I have to say this latest CD is rubbish. It’s one of these post-modern bands with a meaningless name, like HMCR or something, and there’s no music at all – just endless lists of names and bloody numbers…