THIS being Tuesday, the accumulated rubbish of the Christmas holiday must now be on its way from outside my home to the uphead. For those on the Monday list of rubbish removal, this is no ordinary operation, which anyway in most post yule homesteads is fairly enormous anyway.
Spare a thought for those of us on the Monday run. The bin men have not been around to our little homes since December 17th. The following bin day was. Christmas day, the next one New Year's Day. The black plastic bags were already filling our kitchens long before Christmas morning all the empty packets of sultana and suet and the tangerine peel and silver paper and that funny packing straw which, the moment you take your eyes off it, spreads around your house like mice escaping from a lunatic asylum. That all needs to go somewhere.
The bin was long since full, so the black plastic bags began to accumulate in the garden, even before Christmas Day. By Stephen's Day, the back was resembling Dunsink, though without its enterprising band of scavengers. Instead of the scavengers I had my dog Traffic, a wheaten terrier, and his girlfriend Maggot, a Kerry Blue.
In their canine lore, the purpose of a black bag is for it to be opened and its contents spread about the place best of all when the back door is open so that the old ham bone with the mildew on, and the green broth of overlooked and fermenting brussel sprouts, and the heap of mashed potato which is cultivating a blue beard, and the spiced beef you never finished from Christmas Eve, and the nameless sludge you scraped off the frying pans, and which are in bags outside the house can be disinterred from them a moment's work for a dog and thoroughly distributed around the house.
Diligent Dogs
Dogs can be very diligent about things like that, especially when they realise that you have Just vaxed your home. Doggy conscience regards a clean house as an affront to doggy dignity, and dogs know you just love going around the place with a vacuum cleaner. Like Funderland it's part of the inexplicable joys of the human Christmas. You never see a dog in Funderland.
Few things have quite the effect on the human spirit of seeing the contents of four full bags full of primeval slime, six cabbage heads, a gallon of entrails, the dismembered skin of a smoked salmon, a pint of porridge, and 17 shredded news papers around your carefully cleaned new carpet, especially when the two culprits responsible for spreading this mess everywhere are standing in the middle of it, wagging their tails with canine pride.
Two More Weeks
But this is only St Stephen's Day. Two more weeks must elapse before the bin men return. By that time your home could have gone the way of Sierra Leone. So you return the kitchen knife back to the drawer from which you seized it when one of the culprits began to lick your hand with authorial pride and you start to clean up again, Maggot and Traffic doing handstands of excitement around the place, Oh isn't this a great life
No it isn't, not when you know that in other, more favoured parts of Dublin they will receive two visitation from the bin men long before you have seen their jaunty, seamanlike swagger at your front gate.
By half way through the second week, the seagulls are giving Dunsink the miss and are wheeling back to your thoroughly fascinating back garden, squawking in gullish greed as they circle over the enticing mountain of black bags in that odoriferous region where Monday is bin day.
No doubt I should go to Dunsink and deposit a hew bags there myself. No doubt. But I find the old heart isn't in it, not since I took the huge old valve television Set to dump it there. It weighed as much a heifer that's eaten an anvil. I tottered to the cliff edge of the dump site, weaving like a Highlander with a caber, and looked down only as I dropped it vertically over the edge to the dump site 30 me amidst the garbage of the dump, and grinning upwards, was a Dunsink scavenger, grinning even as the plummeting television set headed straight for his teeth.
I see that face even now in my dreams, that grin, undiminished even as a television set was about to rearrange his nostrils yet even as it missed him, as it did, apparently passing through him as if through a mist, he remained grinning upwards. The sight of that grinning, dirty, cheerful face is the soil of thing a fellow can put up with once in a lifetime.
The point is, of course, that since virtually all bank holidays are Mondays, this sort of thing is not new to us in Monday is bin day land. It happens regularly through the year, giving Traffic and Maggot plenty of opportunity to redirect the rubbish from the garden through the house, and to eat lots of it, with predictable consequences.
If you are a sensitive soul, read no further. Please. I beseech you.
Those who are with me yet are you brave? Have you a strong stomach? Only if you have should you pass this second warning.
Final Warning
A final warning. Read no farther if you are squeamish.
Right. Are you ready? Good. Fasten your seat belts. The other morning, hopping out of bed in the pitch dark, my bare foot landed in a about a pint of half solid, half gooey doggy dung on the carpet. It squidged nicely between my toes, lodging in the little crevices there quite perfectly, and marooned me as securely to the spot as if I were in a minefield and had just heard a detonator spring go ping beneath my foot.
When's bin day? that's the question people never ask when they buy a house. Believe me, if you'd stood in the pitch dark in a pool of pooch pooh in your bedroom, while vultures hobbled around your back garden, squawking happily, it would be the only question you would ever ask. Believe me.