Tris of the Dump

I went for a trip to the dump on Saturday. I know this doesn’t sound particularly cool, but it turned out to be great fun.

I’ve been clearing the South Africans detritus out of the shed and bagging it up in rubble bags. It was stacked to the roof with Afrikaner-Krapp and I’ve been both amazed and appalled by what I found in there: barbeque grills that had been left unwashed to fester, more gnawed chicken bones, two full cans of petrol (perhaps for starting off the barbeques), old cutlery and crockery, sports socks, a broken Breville toasted sandwich maker.

I can’t drive, so my friend Tony gamely agreed to drive across London in his old red Ford Escort so I could get all this stuff to the tip. As Emily was at yoga on Saturday morning, Mila and Frankie had to come along with us. It turned out that the dump was about twice as much fun as Alton Towers for the kids, so this was a good move.

After a car journey of horror along the Lea Bridge Road, braving irate drivers caught at temporary traffic lights at a rail bridge and frustrating one way systems, we eventually arrived at the South Access Road Tip.

Note: It is almost impossible to find a tip in Waltham Forest on the web. This is because the council uses the customer-friendly term ‘household waste centre’. Another example of a public service organisation that doesn’t know how to talk to the public.

We dumped off all the rubbish in the back of the car into big skips guarded by cheap East European and African labour (isn’t it interesting that the Boers descend on London just as we have invented our own form of employment apartheid?). Then the kids noticed a big pile of bicycles that you could just grab a child-vehicle from. God help me, my kids love a freebie when they see one. We appropriated a bike for Frankie and microscooter for Mila.

So we went to the tip to get rid of rubbish and ended up returning with scrap metal. Ah well, that’s a form of recycling I suppose…