Salvation from junk in High heavens

1:42pm Friday 25th July 2008

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I HAD a rubbish holiday last week.

No, I really did, because I spent most of it at the High Heavens tip in Booker.

Instead of going away, I used my first period of leave this year to clear out junk from my home.

It all began five years ago when we first moved to our new house. We carefully packed our belongings into boxes, several of which we marked garage'.

The intention was to store these away and open them after we had settled in. We even put up a clothes rail inside the garage and hung loads of spare shirts and jackets on it.

There was a pram, an exercise bike, several mattresses and chairs - all of which were probably worth a few bob.

But then five years passed and we realised we hadn't bothered opening any of the boxes, we'd left the clothes gathering dust and doubled the amount of stuff stored in the garage.

Finally, it dawned on me something had to be done when I realised I couldn't even get through to read the meters. The 17ft long room was filled to the brim with precious' items we hadn't used in half a decade.

We even had our old sideboard in there which had a few bottles of whisky inside. There was absolutely no chance of having a tipple because it was completely blocked off by boxes, chairs, old toys and spiders.

What's more, it was all starting to be scary. A year or so ago, I even found a perfectly-preserved dead bat in the garage. It must have flown in from the woods because there were no signs of a colony.

I have to add that last sentence because bats are a protected species, and presumably I could have a bunch of David Attenboroughs commandeer my house if I'm not careful.

I declared enough was enough, so Mrs Editor's Chair and I set about the clear-up operation.

We had to be ruthless, even though I have a pathological fear of throwing away old stuff in case it's valuable.

The pram, for instance, had cost £450 six years ago and was a top-of-the-range model. But I had to accept no one would want a baby buggy completely encrusted in dirt and slime.

There were electrical goods, coats, furniture and cuddly toys - it felt like the Generation Game's conveyor belt in reverse.

I thought for a moment one of the High Heavens workers wanted to recycle the pram after I chucked it on to a skip. I watched as he carried it out and began wheeling it away.

For a moment, I thought it was going to be restored, and that I'd thrown away something genuinely valuable. But no, he just wheeled it to another skip - the scrap metal one - and threw it in.

I did manage to give several giant bags of clothes to a charity shop in High Wycombe and also donated some items to a jumble sale, but the majority of the junk was genuinely unusable.

We became a permanent fixture at High Heavens. My little hatchback made so many trips there and back that I'm sure it destroyed a sizeable section of the ozone layer.

And I suppose I should be grateful the county council took all my rubbish for free. There was a sign outside the dump saying just how much had been recycled by the public, so I suppose we should be proud.

I suppose we should be proud we personally sifted all our rubbish into the various designated skips, thereby helping to preserve the planet.

But something seemed wrong. Like most of you, I pay hefty council tax and see little for it.

The one thing we all do benefit from, though, is council rubbish collections.

But, while the district council lectures us on recycling, it won't collect anything over and above the one wheelie-bin load a week.

It won't pick up our extra garbage - not even one piddly additional black sack if it doesn't fit into the bin.

So we have to do it ourselves by driving to the dump, polluting the roads and squandering oil reserves.

And then councillors complain we're all using our cars too much.