Wright's Aerials
 
The Dance of the Wheeliebin

Well, I got myself into a right pickle tonight! We have a wheeliebin, you know, a big dustbin that you have to push to the front gate the night before the bin men come. Now the trouble is this wheeliething isn't big enough for all our rubbish. I can't take stuff to the dumpit because of the fascist discrimination against van drivers, and in any case I'm banned for life after I made a stand (I'm banned from Asda and the Royal Oak as well for making a stand; jobsworths don't like it when you make a stand) so we really have to cram as much into the wheelie as we can. Now you might laugh, but what I do is climb into the bin and jump up and down on the rubbish. I usually do this when I finish work in the workshop, which can be about the same time as the pub next door tips out. So I'm quite used to passers by shouting comments when they see me dancing in the wheelie. Typically, I might get “I see she’s put you in your place!” or “Feeling a bit down in the dumps?”

Tonight things went very badly. I usually jump up into the bin without any trouble, but this time I forget to move the bin away from the house so I hit my head on the wall. Once in the bin, the first indication I had that something was wrong was when my feet felt very heavy. At first I just put it down to my age. I mean, I think I’m doing quite well jumping up there in the first place, never mind the dancing, but eventually I just had to stop. My feet were like lead. My method of exiting the bin is to take one foot out and hang it behind me, then allow the bin and myself to fall in that direction. As we descend I skillfully land on my back foot then jump out, at the same time restoring both my own and the bin’s verticality. If passers by are present I might then give a theatrical bow. But this time the maneuver went badly wrong. I got the back foot out all right and landed quite well, but the front foot wouldn’t move and I hopped around with the entire wheelie attached to my leg. Unlike the passers by I soon tired of the comic potential of this so I pulled hard, and half the contents of the bin came out on the end of my leg. This was obviously a good bit of business from the comedic viewpoint because the audience (as it now was) roared with delight as I clumped round the yard swearing. It seems that some polystyrene packing material in the bin had reacted with the contents of an aerosol, punctured by my dance. The result was a mass of sticky foam.

The aftermath was that I was banned from the house until I had been thoroughly scrubbed. Yet when Ginger, madam’s favourite cat, came in tonight absolutely black bright, he got a nice blanket to lie on. Ah well. I know my place . . .

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