WHEELIE BIN DRAMA

It's proper autumn now that the clocks have gone back. Dark evenings, rain-speckled windows, chilly round the knees - all we need is a frost to really get Hood's Real Autumn going.

Today's no exception. I woke up late and rushed to get the bins out. Every week it seems Monday night passes me by and I have to do the bins on a Tuesday morning. I raced out there, jeans over pyjamas, rumbling the bin towards its row of counterparts. My neighbours are clearly more organised than me.

It was barely a row today though - just a sort of sprawl of wheelie bins. I wondered at first, whether I'd missed the bin-men and they'd just left them higgledy-piggledy. But they don't usually do that; a quick flip of the lids showed black bin bags still stuffed inside, uncollected.

I'm no Columbo but it didn't take long to solve the mystery.

The 3-Car-Neighbours have taken to squeezing all three of their vehicles onto the two vacant parking spaces outside my house. It's a tale for another time about how challenging this is but I'll not go there today. One of the vehicles is a van, and yesterday (much to the annoyance of the lady who can't reverse down her drive), it was straddled half over the parking space, and half over the corner of the drive - exactly where the wheelie bins go every week.

So, I'm assuming that this morning, as the drizzle fell through the cold grey sky, Mr 3-Car-Neighbour couldn't get into his van because his driver door was blocked by a row of his neighbours' wheelie bins! So (I imagine) with a giant huff, he parted them like the Red Sea, climbed in, and drove off.

I closed the lid and headed back inside. There was definitely a part of me that wanted to move every one of those bins into a neat row, actually on the parking space the van had left behind. I didn't do that. I thought it would make me feel mean and vindictive, then guilty, when later I'd look out and watch him unable to park. You can call me old-fashioned if you like but I don't like doing mean things to people, even if they'd be mean to me without batting an eyelid. And if you think about it, these people with their trio of rotating vehicles are always going to ensure that I can't park outside my home.

A while later, I was working away when I happened to see Captain Tom slip out from Number 27. He saw the bins, still spread out like teenagers, so he shuffled through the rain and flipped open one of the lids. He, like me, was greeted with the shiny black of a drizzled bin-bag.

Then, very carefully, he moved every single one of them into single file, until a long row of soggy wheelie bins lined up like soldiers, right over the empty parking space. I chuckled to myself, quite unseen by the Captain of course, I gave him a cheeky salute from behind the net curtains.