The ultimate dump. Not broken or burnt out. Not abandoned with a vague hope of rescue. Dumped. The sort of item that might give you cause to pause, even when armed with an extra-long barge pole.
So here’s the challenge: make ironing seem sexy. It is remarkable the number of household chores – decorating, gardening, sewing, cooking – that have been transformed into lifestyle hobbies, tasks that people willingly take on for their own amusement, and yet there are still some activities that resist renovation, that refuse to be incorporated under […]
Brian stared glumly out across the field of stalls and table tops. Rows of white vans were lined up behind trestle tables as far as the eye could see, their rear doors flung open as more and more objects were being disgorged from inside. A throng of anoraks and beanies shuffled between the tables, moving […]
Admit it, there’s something a little scary about dead gas bottles. They sit there like unexploded bombs, all that self-contained power waiting to be released, instantly, unexpectedly. They could go off at any moment. Whatever they hold must be dangerous because it is constrained by so much heavy metal, a solid force field neutralising all […]
Of the dead futon it can be said that it lies slumped like no other discard. It is the most bodily of laneway deaths, short of finding an actual body. When the time comes and I’m lying in the gutter breathing my last as Life’s Great Garbage Truck rumbles towards me, this is how I […]
In years to come, on cold winter nights when folk gather around their fires to warm frozen fingers and swap stories, somebody will inevitably ask, ‘Does anybody remember the Great Grass Catcher Cull of 2011? Spring, I think it was.’ Indeed it was, for I was there on that crisp, clear morning as the first […]