240L

Stand in front of our house on a sunny day and you’ll hear the clip clop of hooves, the sound of a tractor at work, and some very strange excerpts from cyclist’s shouted conversations as they pass by. You might even hear someone say “Can you believe that? He’s out there taking pictures of the bloody wheelie bin again!?”

Luckily whoever would be saying that isn’t in the house, or they’d have something to say about me sitting here writing about it again. So 240L, I assume, is the capacity of the bin and helpfully it’s there in braille too, which is only fair because the blind should obviously have as much access to useless information as anybody else.

However, the only really useful bit of information on a wheelie bin is not the capacity or how loud it is, but the colour. We are lucky enough to only have two – black for stuff that goes to landfill, and green for stuff that they pretend to recycle, but actually goes to landfill. Some places have three or four, along with a strange assortment of bags and boxes that go out on the road on particular days. These are apparently policed by an army of stab-vest wearing hitlers who take great pleasure in issuing crippling fines to the elderly for accidentally putting a normal tea bag in the bin reserved for herbal tea bags. The proceeds of all these fines, after the hitlers’ wages have been paid, are stashed away in Icelandic banks to pay for the local councillors’ next “fact-finding mission” to Barcelona or Florida. Anyway, back to the bins themselves…

You would think then, that they might have put the colour on the bin in braille instead of the capacity, but no. If you’re blind, I guess you must go out to your bins and (by somehow managing to get your finger in the right place) discover that you have three identical bins, all with 240L capacity, but no clue as to which one to put your cardboard in.