bin

like many comic readers i have often wished i had a super power. swinging across town like spider-man, flying through the sky like the human torch, looking through girl’s clothes like superman (mmm perhaps not the right use of x-ray vision, but unlike supes i am not heroic, just very shallow). for all of that the one power i wish had would be that of perfect understanding and usage of all languages. the thrill of haikus in japanese, the joy of the arabian nights in persian, to chit chat with stephen fry and gyles brandreth without worrying about incorrect conjugation and of course to be able to curse in fluent kangaroo.
it would have been a power that would have come in useful the other day.
for some it might come as a surprise but i abhor litter. i don’t mind mess in my flat. it is my space and i have created it. in public i fume when i see people casually throw their rubbish on the floor. in a patocracy such people would be put in the stocks to have rubbish thrown at them.
there i was leaving sainsbury’s, it had been a long hot day, i was tired and tetchy. he was just about to get on his bike, his bag over his shoulder. with a last hearty chug on his bottle of water it was empty and quicker than you could say jack flash the bottle was bouncing off the pavement.
i saw red.
normally i just curse. this time i shouted.
why did i bother? mostly because he was a middle aged bloke and for some strange reason i thought he should know better.
“did you have to do that? couldn’t you have put it in a bin”
he looked at me as if i were an alien (to be far it might also have been the fact that when i get angry my voice goes into the squeak register).
“there isn’t a bin here” he replied with a spanish accent.
i alerted him to the fact that there was one by the main doors of the supermarket, that there were several on the main road. his reply (and i can’t fault him on this) was that there was not a bin right where we were.
i asked him if he would do this in his home country? that is racist he told me. no, i informed him, it would have been racist if i had said “oi dago do you do that at home”. the humour was lost on him. why can’t you take it to the bin, why make the place a mess? i asked. he blamed sainsbury’s they haven’t put a bin here and they make millions, so it is their fault. the logic of the argument pretty ironclad and even better it absolved him of ever having to put rubbish in a bin, because the bin had to be right by him, or else it was someone else’s fault.
we too-ed and fro-ed like this for several minutes (my voice going into chipmunk and back down to low and ominous and then back up to glass shattering shriekness), in the end i asked him which direction he was going in. he pointed in the direction of the cambridge heath road exit (remember he is on a bike).
“a-ha”, i exclaimed, “you can put it in the recycle bins that sainsbury’s provide”.
smugly he tells me that they are nothing to do with sainsbury’s and that they are for charity. seemingly even doing something for charity was too much for him.
at that moment i decided that the super power i wanted more than anything else was wolverine’s claws so that i could have eviscerated the wanker.