The Idler

It Smelt of Burning Turd

I was once employed to cover 11 years of Northamptonshire’s rubbish in bin liners.

I turned up to this Biffa waste disposal site in the lovely fields surrounding the M1. You couldn’t see the waste disposal site from the motorway as they had put a big hill in front of it.

My instructions were that I was to meet a guy called Dave and he’d tell me what to do. He first laughed for quite a long time about my apparel (t-shirt, shorts and trainers - come to think of it, he might have been laughing at my legs … anyway). Then he pointed me towards a haystack sized roll of black bin liners on a metal cart, sent me out of the hut and told me to go round the corner and “up the hill”.

I turned the corner and stopped dead in my tracks - as far as my eye (fast filling with water) could see was a mountain of black gunge. It stretched out as far as I could see to the left and to the right and straight ahead. I now know what it is to look at a desert when you need a pint.

I walked up to the foot of the mountain and pressed my foot against it. It gave way and then sprang back to its original shape. Which was the shape of nothing. The shape of your bed in a pitch black room. The shape of things to come.

It smelt of burning turds.

I splonched over The Gunge (which I learned was the last 11 years of domestic waste produced by the good people of the county (nappies, baked bean cans, rubber bands, lawnmowers, Arab straps) decomposed to the extent that each bit of crap looked and felt exactly like every other bit of crap, a forerunner of chart music in the nineties), wheeling my trolley past plastic tubes expelling trapped methane, conveniently placed at head height, to find a group of men, all in white boiler suits and gas masks like you see on films dealing with aliens/small nuclear mishaps, pointing at me.

The men probably saw the fear and nausea in my face as they didn’t laugh at my clearly inadequate clothing, and only pointed at the ground and indicated that I was to start laying the bin bags over The Gunge. The idea was that when I had finished they could lay turf over it and bunnies could live there.

I quickly estimated that this would only take me about the rest of my life to achieve, factored in the remuneration (�3.15 per hour worked, no paid lunch break), dropped my cart handle on the floor and fucked off home for a smoke.

Although I now work, it is with a smile on my face and no gas mask.

Pete McG