Now: Rubbish
Since moving to the UK, I’ve started using the word rubbish a lot. It’s something that they do here. Use different words. Whenever I hear myself say it I wonder if I’m just cosplaying a British person, or if I’m importing British vernacular as a strategy to keep too much attention off of myself, or if it’s some psychological safety thing. Anyway I’m not going to stop saying rubbish because it’s a good word.
The main way that people use it around here is to describe something not very good, but which is also not very important. Nigel Farage’s misguided rightwing populism is awful, but some football club owner’s misguided rightwing populism is rubbish. A leak in the ceiling is awful but an overdone sticky toffee pudding is rubbish.
The weather has been rubbish for like three weeks.
No sun, alternating between fog and low cloud; continuous drizzle. The rivers are overflowing; the bankside paths are three or four inches of slippery clay-heavy mud. In the woods, fallen leaves have disintegrated into a thin, glazed-over wetbrown slurry where even fell shoes cannot find purchase. My own breath hangs in the nighttime beam of my headtorch so I cannot find my way among the puddles. Sometimes, before an evening walk, Ghyll looks at me at the threshold with an expression that says, I think I’ll take a pass on smelling all of the other dogs’ pee this evening.
Rubbish weather; rubbish time of year.
The trees are all dormant and their naked branches reveal the other type of rubbish: the literal kind, tossed thoughtlessly by the way. Vape pens, empty cider cans, crisp packets, dog poo. A plastic road barrier, a dollhouse. A decomposing bag of sharp sand and discoloured takeaway box flattened by car tyres. Shredded plastic blown into the trees. A smear of something white drawing Ghyll's interest.
The town seems to be overflowing with it. Not for lack of rubbish bins but for lack of pride, lack of shame. Row on row of tattered polyester flags shipped direct from Shenzhen, from the factories that took all of the jobs that people round here used to do.
We wrote to the council asking for trash bags and litter pickers and they arrived a few days later. They’re sitting in the garage. We went on a litter pick last year but the rubbish reaccumulated after a few weeks. I need to get back out there.
I feel, much of the time, that my One Trick is that I’m prepared to work a bit harder than everyone else — I’m not particularly smart, nor particularly organised, but I am willing to brute force my way through a problem. I want to brute force this town out of its broken windows thinking. And I guess I need to get started before the leaves come out and hide all of the gross crap lying in the verges.
