Fourteen Bottle Caps and a Pram Wheel: What One Bin Bag Taught Me About Where I Live

The email said 'meet at the village hall car park, 9am, bring gloves'. It did not say bring a notebook. I brought a notebook anyway, because I have never entirely trusted an activity that ends without a record of it, and because I had a theory to test.

The theory was this: nobody actually enjoys litter-picking. What people enjoy is standing next to other people while doing something mildly useful, and then stopping for a biscuit. The picking is the pretext. The biscuit is the point.

Forty minutes later I had one full bin bag, one damp notebook, and a considerably better understanding of my neighbours than four years of nodding at them over the hedge had managed.

The Ledger

I will not pretend the ledger was requested. It was not. But there is something deeply satisfying about a list, and once you start numbering the cigarette ends you find it surprisingly hard to stop. The final tally, transcribed that afternoon at the kitchen table while my tea went cold:

• 14 bottle caps, of which 9 were the same brand, suggesting either a single enthusiastic consumer or a small localised party
• 1 pram wheel, detached, unexplained
• 63 cigarette ends, a figure I stopped counting at 40 and then estimated, which I realise undermines the whole enterprise
• 1 oven glove, left-hand, no partner
• 4 dog poo bags, tied, neatly placed on top of a wall, which is somehow worse than if they had simply been left on the grass
• 1 school shoe, size 9, adult, and I have decided not to think about it
• 1 laminated menu from a takeaway that closed, I am fairly sure, in 2019
• Assorted sweet wrappers, receipts, and a single unopened letter addressed to a house two streets away, which we delivered, because we are not animals

The pram wheel caused the most discussion. Nobody could place it. It sat in the middle of the bag like a small accusation.

The Excuses

What I had not anticipated was the apology economy. At least six people, none of whom had dropped anything, felt compelled to explain themselves to me.

'That's not mine, that,' said one man, gesturing at a drinks can roughly nine feet from his front gate. 'I'd have got it, but my knee's been playing up.'

Another assured me that the fast-food wrapper in the hedge was 'probably the wind'. It was in a hedge, six feet from the road, at the top. The wind, in this scenario, would need to have been a very focused individual.

I want to be clear that I found this entirely charming rather than infuriating. There is something wonderfully British about feeling obliged to deny responsibility for litter you did not create, to a man in a hi-vis vest who has known you for eleven years and does not care in the slightest.

The Row at the Recycling Point

By half past nine we had gathered by the bins and the whole thing had, as these things do, turned into a meeting.

The first motion was whether the small bin by the rec should be emptied more often, which everyone agreed on loudly and nobody could action.

The second was whether we ought to be sorting the recyclables as we picked. This produced a genuine schism. One camp held that a litter pick is a litter pick and sorting is a job for the depot. The other camp — mostly one man with strong views and a grabber — argued that if we are going to the trouble of picking it up, we may as well do it properly. A Costa cup was held aloft as evidence for reasons that were never fully explained.

The third debate, the one that nearly took the roof off, was whether a certain unnamed household's habit of leaving bags beside the recycling point on non-collection days constitutes fly-tipping or 'just being organised'. It was suggested, not unkindly, that a note might be posted through a door. It was then established that the note had already been posted through the door, twice, and that the household in question is on holiday.

Democracy, in a car park, at 9:40am. I recommend it.

The Biscuit Interval

The urn was produced at ten, from a boot, wrapped in a tea towel. Custard creams, a packet of something chocolate, and a tupperware of what I can only describe as 'a nice bit of cake'.

Here is where my theory hardened. Nobody lingered over the bins. Everybody lingered over the tea. We stood in the cold for twenty-five minutes discussing a planning application, a dog with a limp, and whether the bus timetable had got better or worse, and by the end of it I knew the name of the woman three doors down who has the very noisy hedge.

What the Ledger Actually Says

I had expected the notebook to be funny. It is a bit funny. But reading it back the next morning, what struck me was the smaller thing hiding underneath all those numbers.

A village is not held together by anything dramatic. It is held together by people turning up on a Saturday when they would rather not, to pick up a pram wheel they did not lose, so that someone else's child does not stand on it. Local pride, as far as I can work out, is not flags or hanging baskets or a sign saying 'Best Kept Village, 2018'. It is noticing. It is the low-grade, lifelong habit of noticing that the hedge has a wrapper in it, and that the bin by the rec is full, and that the household next to the recycling point has gone on holiday.

And it is, in my experience, entirely inseparable from a custard cream.

We filled three bags in the end. Fourteen bottle caps went in. I have kept the notebook, because I have a theory about next year's tally, and because I am the sort of man who keeps a notebook. If you see me by the recycling point in the spring, I will be the one with the flask and the pen. Bring gloves. Bring strong opinions.

Bring biscuits.