It is the garden club AGM and supper tonight, and so the first thing I had to do this morning was make a pudding. Last year's array of puddings was truly splendid, and I am making the same pudding again. I thought that after twelve months nobody would remember, and it is a recipe I know how to do and that travels well, Dan Lepard's cherry and polenta cake.
Then before I could finish potting the tulips I had to go and buy another bale of compost. It served me right for not scoping the task more carefully before I started, since I passed by the Clacton branch of B&Q only last week and could have picked up a bag then, if only I'd thought of it. Two of the five bags of fifty bulbs were short, one by two and the other by three bulbs. I wish merchants wouldn't do that. Five bulbs out of two hundred and fifty is not enough to be worth complaining about, but still it leaves me feeling slightly hard done by.
The phone rang just as I was heading out into the garden, and it was the council's outsourced garden waste collection firm calling back about the garden waste bin, which should have been emptied last Friday and was not. It turned out they thought they knew about my bin: was it the one with the piece of metal on the lid? I agreed that the lid was mended with a short length of meccano where it had split, presumably in the course of being emptied since it had been fine one day when I put it out, and broken when I went to get it back. Only one of the bin men had cut his hand on the metal through his glove and they were going to have to give me a new bin, so they had been hoping someone would ring up claiming ownership.
I was faintly baffled how anybody could cut themselves on meccano while wearing industrial gloves, when meccano is normally given to children to play with, but sorry someone had been hurt. The woman from the waste company said it was alright, it was an accident, and they knew there were issues over the quality of the bins. It would be emptied, probably tomorrow, and if I could not refill it then a different lorry would bring me a new bin and take the old one away. I should like to think that our existing bin will fitted with a new lid, but have a dark suspicion it will simply be scrapped. I'm not sure the council and their contractors have entirely got environmental consciousness nailed, since I've only had the bin a couple of years so it can't have been emptied more than about fifty times. Does fifty bin's worth of green waste being composted for the council offset the embedded environmental cost of making the bin? Probably not.
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