Cact-High and Bin There

I keep meaning to do a blog post showing off this ridiculous cactus. Some of you may remember when I rescued it from the ‘Almost But Not Dead Yet’ section in supermarket a few years ago. You can see how big it was when I bought it - the original growth is a darker green on three of its whatever you call ‘em - stems? Proboscis? Trunks? Anyway, it has grown another six of whatever they are, and I’ve just noticed another baby nubbin has appeared in the centre of the group, so it is now a cactus family of ten thingies. It has achieved the magnificent height of 22 and a bit inches. Here is Bambino getting involved, as he is wont to do…

He gave it a nosey poke and then went on his way. It’s not a prickly cactus; more fuzzy really, but when I pot it on I do wear gardening gloves and wrap it in paper in case I find out I am fatally allergic to the thing. 

This has nothing whatsoever to do with what I was originally going to write about but I saw the cactus, remembered I have been meaning to write about it forever, and carpe cactus, as they don’t say, at least not without a sturdy pair of gloves. See it as Sunday bonus content, if you will.

Back to the original thought. Recently, my brother and I were having a companionable chunter about bin collections. This came about because his next-door-but-one neighbour has gone all eco-zealous (he might be related to Ed Miliband for all we know) and has installed a heat pump, an electric car charging point and some solar panels in, on and around his small terraced house. He has discovered his domestic electricity supply cannot cope with the extra demand and so the National Grid people had to come out and install a bigger cable (something like that - I shan’t pretend to understand all the technicalities) which involved closing the road for four days in order to dig across it and lay aforesaid new cable. 

It is a busy road. The road closure caused all sorts of annoyances, mostly because drivers wanting to use the road were ignoring the Road Closed signs, moving the traffic cones and trying to drive across the newly dug trench. When they discovered they couldn’t, because the road was, indeed, CLOSED, they were turning around in my brother’s driveway, which enrages him and quite rightly so. However, the only road users who seemed to abide by the Road Closed signs were the bin/ rubbish/ household waste management/ whatever they call themselves these days people who did not collect the bins because the road was closed. They’d be back in two weeks’ time. There will be no effort to make the missed collection sooner, even though the road opened again the following day. 

Anyway, more rage on my brother’s plate about the non-collection of bins for another fortnight, and we got talking about bin collections when we were children back in the 60s and 70s. Then, they were called dustmen. They’d collect bins before 7 a.m so as not to hold up rush hour traffic. And they used to walk around the back of the house to collect them from where they were stored. None of this ‘place your bins on the boundary of your property or they won’t be emptied’ malarkey that we have now. We decided, my brother and I, that THOSE dustmen would DEFINITELY have come back the following day to make up for the missed collection because they were cheery, responsible, and they liked the dog. 

Aaah, the good ole days! When life was simpler, nothing was digital except the new-fangled calculators and watches, there was snow in Winter, sunshine in Summer and only three TV channels. 

Makes me feel a bit wistful…