What A Load Of Rubbish!

Unless you live on the stretch of the South Coast covered by 'South Today' you won't be aware that here in Southampton the dustmen have been on strike for weeks. Last Friday's local paper told us that the union covering dustmen has a 'war chest' of twenty million pounds, enabling the strike to carry on indefinitely. The strange thing is, the paper says that there will be another strike starting, as if they go back to work then stop again, but we haven't had our regular bins emptied for about six weeks now. The recycling bins were emptied maybe three weeks ago but who cares about that? We need the general, stinky rubbish clearing. The street cleaners are also on strike and it's beginning to get pretty ropey around here.

 Southampton city centre

We are finding it reasonably difficult even though we have four bins, two general and two recycling. We didn't buy extra bins but we live on a main road and years ago we came down one Sunday morning to find, first a wheelie bin in the front garden followed by a recycling bin on top of the car a few months later. We assumed drunks'd pushed them from outside houses further up the road and abandoned them at ours - what larks! Obviously we kept them and it's a jolly good job we did too! But if it's getting bad for us it must be worse for people who don't have a waste disposal system. When we had our new kitchen put in years ago we'd just come back from a villa in Florida and I insisted on having a 'garbage gobbler'. Thank goodness I did - all the food waste goes straight down the drain. Even so we have (or did have until this evening when Big Man, Mr Charming and Carb Addict burned them in the brazier) four black sacks full of rubbish too. It was warm today, they were getting smelly, there's MILLIONS of fat, lazy flies around.......what can I say, I live with pyromaniacs. And the smell from the fire was so foul that I'm surprised nobody called the police.

Student ghetto!!!

There's a student enclave near us and each year when they move out of their rented houses they tend to throw incredible amounts of 'stuff' out....kitchen utensils, clothing, bits of furniture, unopened packets of food...must be £000's of stuff. The universities set up a scheme a couple years back where the students could leave anything decent and reusuable outside their houses on a particular day at the end of term and it would get collected - it's still ongoing  - but it's always a mess at this time of year. Now it's just dreadful! Walking through there the other day I could see bags of unopened pasta, noodles, crackers; a pair of practically unused Ugg boots; a TV - I was so tempted to scrag some items but oh, the indignity of being seen and labelled as a middle-aged pikey deterred me. It's a throwaway society we live in and no mistake.

More student house trash round the corner from me :(

It really shows what dirty, lazy pigs people can be when you see the city centre littered with McDonalds' bags and wrappers, empty pop bottles and bits of paper - did their parents never tell them not to be a litterbug? I always made sure my kids used a rubbish bin and even Carb Addict, my special boy knows to put his rubbish in a bin, or failing that his pocket until he gets home. I think McDonalds should have staff out on the streets picking up their litter, if nobody else's. In fact I think all businesses should be responsible for sweeping and tidying outside their own establishment as a matter of course, not just when there's a strike on. Isn't that what they do in other countries?

Across the road from me...yuk

We have lost all civic pride in this country!!!!!

Here endeth the rant.

PS  I'm not sure how much blogging I'll be able to do from today because I'm having a visitor for a week, one who talks even more than I do AND expects me to answer. Yes, Babcia is coming to visit.

If she doesn't miss the coach, obviously.