Tidying up for the New Year

It's been a while since my last posting... or which apologies.
So to make up here are a few random jottings to end the year.

• Apparently almost 200 dustmen have been assaulted this year by householders furious at the "alternate weekly collection". A spokesman said, 'Emptying the bins from more than 20million homes is a huge undertaking and certain rules are necessary to enable the job to be done quickly and efficiently.' The rules seemed to work a few years back - the dustmen would come into your back garden, hoist the dustbin on their shoulders, carry it to the dustcart, empty it and return it and (hopefully) put the lid back on and close your garden gate. Why is it more complicated now than it was then?
• Senior policeman Cressida Dick has been awarded the Queen's Police Medal for distinguished service. She, you will remember, was in charge of the operation that resulted in a totally innocent Brazilian electrician being shot dead on a Tube train in south London in July 2005. She was promoted not long after and has subsequntly been promoted again. Could she not have waited until retirement before she was given the gong? It seems once again (for the third time) remarkably insensitive of the Metropolitan Police Force to publicise this incompetent woman.
• After the football manager who used the Human Rights Act to prevent the world being told he was sleeping with another man's wife, another uses the same act to prevent the world learning he visits Thai prostitutes. Granted, it may be none of our business who either of these men are but was this really what the Government had in mind when they introduced this piece of legislation?
• The man who was jailed for beating up a burglar who tied up and terrorised his family should be freed immediaely.

Happy New Year. I hope 2010 brings you all that you wish yourselves.

Empty the bins, damn you!

The world has officially gone mad - or at least this country has.

A father-of-three has been fined £225 because his wheelie bin was overflowing - not rubbish strewn on the floor but overflowing.

Council officials took pictures and two turned up on his doorstep wearing stab vests, read Gareth Corkhill his rights and then issued him with an on-the-spot fine of £110.

Taken to court, he was ordered in absentia to pay the fine plus hit with costs of £100 and a £15 surcharge.

Mr Corkhill said: "I could not believe I had been fined for putting rubbish in a bin. I tell my kids not to throw rubbish away and always use a bin."

Whitehaven magistrates convicted Mr Corkhill in his absence of overfilling a receptacle used for waste.

In a statement the council said: "Copeland Borough Council will continue to crack down on the problem of overflowing bins, which cause problems for local residents and in the battle to reduce waste."

Here's a radical solution: why don't they crack down on overflowing bins by emptying them weekly instead of fortnightly?

And why does everyone have to pay a £15 surcharge? Well, I say everyone - if you are sent to prison you don't have to pay it. The surcharge is supposed to go into a fund to help victims of crime - muggings and the like. But if you are convicted of, for example, "overfilling a receptacle used for waste" why should you have to pay towards a mugger's victim when the mugger himself doesn't have to pay if he is, rightly, sent to prison.

Refuse collectors are not supposed to refuse to collect

Some media commentators wonder why we rarely win any sporting events. We still hark back to 1966 for our last (only) major football win and to 1977 for the last time we had anything to cheer about in tennis.

It could be something to do with the fact that we are raising a nation of wimps - children who are told that everything has value and that nothing is second class (especially not their education).

The Health & Safety Executive refuses to let anyone take even the slightest risk. Their mantra seems to be "What do you want to do? You can't."

And now binmen in Havant, Hampshire are are told that they cannot pick up black bags of Christmas rubbish in case they hurt themselves.

Local people, who usually put out household rubbish and recycling on alternate weeks, had wanted extra collections over Christmas.

The council agreed to let them put out a black bag alongside their wheelie bin. But the dustmen decided to ignore the bags and used the council's own rules as their rationale. The rules state that only rubbish in wheelie bins is to be collected while any other rubbish must be left.

Council leader David Gillett said the binmen are wrong. He added: "They've picked up bin bags for the last 100 years and it hasn't bothered them. Why are they suddenly worrying about it?"

In fact, Councillor Gillett is wrong. It wasn't that long ago that dustmen used to go into people's back gardens, hoist metal bins onto their backs and carry them to the dustcart. It is only in the wimpy times that we live in that councils decreed that bins must be plastic and then that householders must leave a bin bag or wheelie bin "on the edge of their property" without any thought for the housebound or feeble.

In addition, when the PC brigade decided that binmen should be renamed "refuse collectors" - we didn't realise that meant that sometimes they would just refuse to collect.