Council Business

I often wonder how many of you actually read the day’s entire blog. I’m not saying I’m blessed with hundreds of people reading but I do know that I can count regular readers on one hand, sometimes even two. That’s one finger per hugely intelligent and divinely blessed individual with the good sense to have bookmarked this blog.

And bookmarking www.the-spine.com is definitely the way to go. I wouldn’t like to think that anybody visits via a link on another blog that only takes them to the latest post when I’ve actually written two other posts today (this and this) , one of which (this) was the day’s proper blog post.

This post, for example, is just an update to say that there’s more civic news from Counciller Barry Prunefield over at The Pangolin. Today he’s discussing council bin collections. Any similarity between Barry’s views and my own are mere coincidental. Any similarity between Barry and other council officials is also a coincidence. Sadly, he doesn't make the following observation which I've just made whilst standing in my slippers in the rain: why do the bin men only arrive at 4pm in the afternoon when you put out your bins at 11pm the previous night? And why when you forgot to put out your bins the previous night do you only remember to put them out when you hear then go flying past on their wagon at 7am?

In other news: it’s raining, The Spectator still haven’t rang about the cartoon competition, and I fear that another cartoon opportunity has passed me by. However, in good news: I have underwear in the wash and tomorrow my loins will smell like Lenor lilacs.

Finally, a message to St Helens Council and our council leader, Barrie Grunewald, regarding their advice to now put cardboard in our black boxes instead of our now largely empty green wheelie bins: you are idiots!

I Wish Samsung Ran My Council

Listen. I need to talk seriously about a subject many of you will find appalling. I don’t mean ‘war crime’ appalling. I mean about as appalling as a serious incident on the High Street on a Saturday night but not involving car keys, eyeballs, or members of the Parachute Regiment.

Yes, that’s right. I want to talk about weekly bin collections.

Christ, I know. I know… Dark days and all that. And it’s tough for me too. Just remain calm and remember: deep breaths. This is only going to be a thousand words long and, if you squint, you might already be able to see daylight in the distance.

Easing myself into my dreams last night with a mental image of Rachel McAdams stroking the contoured lines of the Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 edition) tablet, it suddenly struck me that Samsung should really be in the wheelie bin business.

Beautiful thought, isn’t it?

Now, it takes a special kind of depraved mind to go to sleep combining Rachel McAdams with wheelie bins but until I have a chance to move with Rachel to Samsung’s own island off the coast of South America, sometime around the year 2050, I will have to endure the misery of living in the St Helens area of Merseyside where wheelie bins are a business as serious as my idle fantasising.

Up here it's troll country. We don’t go in for any of that fancy ‘thinking’ in these parts. Reasoning is something you do by smelling the end of your finger and trolls, not being the brightest of beasts, spend a lot of time smelling their own fingers. Take, for example, the trolls in St Helens Council who squeeze out bad ideas like they’ve been fed nothing but slugs, fish oil, and polished ball bearings.

The council are currently introducing new arrangements for our refuse collection. They announced this via bright shiny stickers that appeared on our bins a fortnight ago and promptly stuck to every surface they came into contact with. I forget the exact words because I was blinded by our sticker for an entire day but I do recall mention of an ‘improved service’ as a friend helped peel away the sticker along with most of my eyebrows.

‘An improved service! Whoopee!’ we both cried and then began to examine the small print.

The council are now promising to empty our regular brown bin one week and then, seven days later, empty the green bin that contains all our garden waste. Each bin will be emptied twice a month and this is the improved service.

‘Whoopee,’ we both cried again and then we began to do the maths.

Currently the council empties our brown bin every week and the green bin every fortnight. That means they provide six bin collections per month. The new arrangements mean that we’ll have only four bin collections.

That wasn’t the kind of improvement I was expecting. In fact, I would have furrowed my eyebrows if I’d had any.

An improvement is going from a 1.4GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A9, A8 processor to a 1.9 GHz octa-core Samsung Exynos 5420 SoC processor, as Samsung have cleverly done with the new 2014 Note. An improvement is doubling the resolution, replacing a 1280×800 pixel display with one that has 2560x1600 pixels. An improvement is increasing the ergonomic design by adding a faux-leather back to the tablet design.

A thirty three percent drop in the number of bin collections is not what I’d call an improvement. It sounds like one of those ‘Apple improvements’ when subsequent models of iPad got heavier, battery life shortened, and you needed to stick a wire coat hanger up your sleeve just to get a half-decent Wi-Fi signal.

Yet the part that gnaws me to the bone isn’t the reduction in our services. All our councils have to make cuts and I understand the concept of austerity. But I do believe that if a government or council are forced to reduce a service, they shouldn’t lie about it. Just tell it to me straight, like a pear cider that’s made from 100% pears. I’m not an idiot. I know that six is bigger than four. In fact, if I had a Samsung Note (2014 edition) in front of me now, I would scribble that sum onto the screen, wait a fraction of a second for the cutting-edge handwriting recognition software to decrypt my scrawl and then an infinitesimally small space of time as it did the calculation. Instead I’m counting on my fingers and my curled pinky and ring finger show me that it’s a decrease of exactly two bin collections a month.

I detest bad news dressed up like some gormless ITV rhetoric promising the year’s best entertainment over shots of Simon Cowell and mad old men playing tunes on their armpits. It implies we’re too dumb to spot that we’re being lied to. A man could get angry at the way my council talks-up a cut. He could get angry that they’re wasting money providing expensive colour leaflets that promotes some lousy policy as revolutionary thinking. A man could get…

Oh hang on! They’ve drawn eyes on the bins to make them look like cheerful characters. Everything I’m saying must be wrong and life in St Helens is peachy!

Today more glossy leaflets arrived through the letterbox and, as you can see by the accompanying diagram, we now have a friendly cast of characters to cheer on.



In addition to our main brown bin, we have one irritatingly happy black plastic box dog for tins, one drunk single-but-has-joined-Friends-Reunited pink bag for plastic bottles, one so-studious-he-probably-reads-The-Telegraph blue bag for newspapers, a sweet little ‘kerbside caddy’ (probably from a broken home) for fetid and stinking food, and one green bin clearly on the game and ready to pleasure our garden waste. The ‘Red Bottom’ is just my addition to the leaflet so ignore it for a moment…

Now, at this point, you’re probably thinking: isn’t he getting a little too excited about the bins? ‘Hey! Burke Bevel,’ you shout. ‘Isn’t this what old people talk about? Soon you’ll be complaining about the low necklines of BBC newsreaders and wondering why the Queen hasn’t knighted George Alagiah.’

But isn’t this the stuff that really matters? Isn’t this the warning sound of the creaking rope that holds up the great bureaucratic chimp swing that will eventually collapse and bring about the end of western civilisation? We won’t pollute ourselves into oblivion. Our brains will simply evolve to the point where most of their functions will be given over to figuring out what we’re meant to do with egg shells and what day we put out the potato peels.

Take this final piece of troll logic as an example.

For years we’ve all been using our green bins for cardboard. Only we’re now told that the green bin is to be used only for garden waste. Of course, between October and March, nobody cuts their lawn or trims the hedge so under this brilliant new scheme our green bins will stand empty for about half the year.

Meanwhile, we are now told to squeeze two weeks of cardboard into a box sized approximately 60x40x30 centimetres. That will be fun. After two weeks, our green wheelie bin is usually so full of cardboard that we can’t close the lid. I’m going to have to buy an industrial strength press just to deal with a week of cardboard.

If the whole thing sounds like an utter mess, there’s only one man I hold responsible.

The name Barrie Grunewald might not mean much to you. It sounds like the name of a troll in Beowolf or some ancient Norse myth. In a way, I think it is. Barrie is my local council leader and resembles a troll in publicity photographs. I never did write to Barrie about the council’s lousy policies for cyclists but it now seems they have an equally absurd policy for recyclists. That’s where the ‘red bottom’ comes into play.

I would humbly like to suggest to Barrie that he takes all his council leaflets and sticks them… Well, I’ll let him figure out ‘what goes where’. I’ve even provided a helpful diagram to guide his hand. And if he’s angry or thinks I’m wrong, I’d simply point out that I’ve added a pair of cartoon eyes to my diagram. Cartoons eyes excuse every kind of stupidity, don’t they?

Let’s Just Shoot All The Cyclists

I’m beginning to see the sense of it. As a cyclist, I mean. After all, I’m nothing but a drain on local resources, a constant thorn in the side of customer service departments. How is Willard told to deal with Kurtz in Apocalyse Now? With extreme prejudice? Well, I feel like Kurtz, muttering ‘the horror, the horror’ here amid the brutes. I’ve clearly gone rogue, off reservation, or, if you prefer, quite quite mad. I’ve lost all rational sense having gorged myself on a diet of existential cycling philosophy and the foolish belief that we were born free to choose how best to live our lives.

Even if you’re a cyclist, you must see that there is a hard-knuckled truth to my words so open your mind and let them in. Society carries on not through the rational will of individuals but because the great barrelling mass of the majority is steeped in some husky pheromone and brazenly ruts behind council refuse bins when dim on Bacardi and sad dreams. Evolution happily coincides with the squirting dash of sperm towards eggs. It’s no more profound than that and for every conscientious couple concerned about world population there are a thousand drunken pricks with immortality on their tips.

Yet all societies eventually neutralise their radical elements. I’m now beginning to see that we cyclists are more radical than most. We try to present a better vision of the world, of communities, and of towns. Yet we’re also immensely disposable since we lack the genetic code for survival. We’re like the dodo birds so friendly to sailors that they never learned to run away even as they were having their necks wrung. Cyclists have a naïve quality. We put ourselves in harm’s way, laying our necks before the heavy vulcanised tread of wiser souls protected by air bags and 4x4 traction. What benefits do consideration, moderation and environmentalism provide for the species other than to weaken it and turn us all into Guardian readers? So I say again, they should just shoot the cyclists. We’re an evolutionary dead end.

Cycling is for dreamers and who needs dreamers in a world of bankers and rat-tailed business suits? Being a cyclist is for another me in another lifetime. It’s of that same mad idealism that made me think I might make it as a writer, humourist, or cartoonist whilst living in small town England. Dream followed dream and now look at me. Tesco’s customer complaints department already treat me like the horsemeat they deny exists in their burgers. Shoot the cyclist. Some hot fragment of lead placed at considerable speed into my ear would solve quite a few problems. After all, I don’t conform to the identikit picture of the British working male that these companies encourage in order to exploit. To do that, I would need to impregnate at least 2.4 women, buy myself an old arse rattler of a car, and then do the shopping once a month at Tesco whilst sucking on a Mayfair king size or packing the Bud.

Yesterday highlighted how selfish I am by continuing to dream. It was one of those mornings at Tesco when my bike got in people’s way. I would have gone to shop elsewhere but there was no alternative but to endure their bike racks. It was also a Friday which meant the town was busy and the bike racks full.

Well, I say ‘full’ but there was one space and I bet you can’t spot it…

This photo illustrates why we cyclists are an extravagance and why Tesco are right to hate us. Here is a perfect example of a cyclist demanding too much. The room taken up by that bike might have held another trolley, pram, baby, mother, other woman, and another oddly angled youth. Just ignore that sign saying ‘bicycle parking’ above their heads. That’s just a little in-joke between Tesco staff. This is actually an example of high level ergonomics and how to maximise space in a dwindling world. This is people folding done the Japanese way. The message is a simple one: let’s just shoot the cyclists…

But even as I type that, I finally feel my sarcasm running dry. I’m left only frustration and a shrug of the shoulders... These are dog-eat-dog days requiring snarling teeth not smiles.

Yesterday showed me that I’m fighting a pointless battle. Tesco have still haven’t adequately replied to my complaint. It’s now over a week since the polite email from ‘Alex’ the Customer Service Manager and, as is shown in the above picture, the situation hasn’t changed. I’m tempted to write again but I’m deciding whether I should give up or open a second front in this attritional war.

A second front, you ask?

It was almost predictable that as soon as I ask for more cycle stands in one part of town that my local council should rip out the bike stands in one of the few places where they were providing a good service.

Bike stands! I can’t believe my life has come down to something as meaningless as these hoops of metal in the ground. Yet here I am thinking of petitioning my local council leader, Barrie Grunewald.



Since he took office in a local government coup earlier this year, I’ve been impressed by Barrie and his ability to grab a headline. He plays labyrinthine politics like some Greek sandal slapper on the trail of the Minotaur threatening to cut council budgets for the third year in a row. Believe me when I say that this man is marked for the national stage. In ten years, look for him on the back benches, quickly shuffling his way to the front. Government posts. Minister for God knows what. Perhaps party leader, Prime Minister, and the world… He also looks like the kind of forward thinking folder snapper who can explain local cycle policy without looking at his notes. To be fair, I can also do that without notes but only because St Helens Council has what appears to be a simple cycling policy:

Let’s just shoot all the cyclists...

Barrie will probably say that he doesn’t make every decision but I bet he knows which pencil chewer in St Helens Council decided to remove these bike stands.

For the last few years, we had two bike stands at the ends of a small street running through our town. They appeared one day as part of a town upgrade and proved very handy if you were going into one of the nearby banks, shops, or opticians. I went there yesterday expecting to leave my bike at the same stand I use three or four times a week. Only I discovered the stand gone. Another stand down the road had also been ripped out. There are now three stands around the corner at the end of the street. I guess it’s a provision of sorts and I also guess that I’m just being lazy. I’ll just have to leave my bike there and walk back to whatever shops I need...

Except, isn’t this another example of the mentality that councils have towards cyclists? Isn’t this the same begrudging nod we always get? Somebody in the last five minutes of a long dull town planning meeting has said:

‘But what about the cyclists?’

And somebody else has tutted, chewed the end of their propelling pencil and then scratched their oversized car-friendly behind.

‘Oh,’ they’ve said, ‘we’ll give them some stands out of the way somewhere so they can’t complain.’

Except I can complain and I do complain. Why did the council take one step back after making a good step forward? Cycle stands aren’t like car parks. You don’t centralise them. You spread them out to aid mobility and increase access to different parts of town. And what harm was there in having bike stands outside shops? That’s just good planning. One small hint of civilisation in this rabbit hutch town.

Of course, they’ll say it’s the cuts. They’ll say that the council once had money to spend on painting bicycles on pavements and putting up cycle racks. They’ll say that austerity has now bitten so hard that they’ve been forced to spend yet more money ripping out the bike stands and building a large and frankly pointless flower bed further up the road. They’ll say the town has been improved.

Except it makes no sense to me. Enlightened thinking has gone back to inside-the-box thinking.

Perhaps I’ll write to Barrie and ask him to explain. Or perhaps I’ll just ask him to shoot me. One way or the other, at least he’ll have put me out of my misery.