Reclaimed! (Or: In Your Face Bin Thief.)

I am victorious. I have triumphed over the powers of darkness. I have bested evil that lurks in the guise of poorly behaved neighbours!

I got my recycling bin back.

Don't scoff, I've been lost without it! Do you know the bourgeois guilt I have suffered with every can, every glass pasta sauce jar that has gone into my regular rubbish over the past three weeks? I'm sure someone is going to report me for it. The Re-Stasi or summint. Anyhoo, that karmic debt has to be paid sometime you know.

3, or maybe it's 4, weeks ago I was slack about bringing my rubbish bins in. Our rubbish is collected from a rear laneway, which all of our back gates open onto. (Think Billy Elliott, but much less drear and with fewer picturesque urchins.) The laneway gets no car traffic, pretty much no traffic of any kind, but our local council still hates it when we leave our bins out. Mind you, 99% of my neighbours leave their bins in the lane all week.

The only problem with that is that you end up with all sorts of things in your bin that you never placed there yourself. Kudos to the people that pick up their dog's turds and bag them in those little black plastic bags. Damnation and hellfire upon those that then stick them in my bin and not their own. Plus the council like to spend the money we give them by coming along and taping the bins shut, with Police Line style tape that with a tsk either says REJECTED or BRING IN YOUR BINS. Ok Judgey McJudgerton.

So if your bin goes missing because you left it out longer than the council mandated 24 hours you officially get NO SYMPATHY. Years ago my Green Waste bin was damaged, and when I rang the council a woman (who sounded remarkably like the last school librarian that found me trying to check out one book too many) barked at me to confess whether I had left it out longer than mandated. No... Miss.

Anyhoo, long story long! My recycling bin went bye byes and I suspected a neighbour nicked it. Maybe to fill a hole in their own existence, who knows? So that they didn't have to ring the council and hear The Voice Of Judgement perhaps. I've stalked the laneway after rubbish collection day ever since, looking for my bin. The one numbered 11, in nice big friendly numbers. I hadn't yet been quick enough to find it before whomever took it in themselves. Tonight I brought in my regular bin as soon as I got home, rather than later in the evening, and took a wander (stalk) up the lane.

And lo. I'll be watching you from now on, number 19.