The mailman came to work yesterday and handed me the post. It’s what they do. When they feel so inclined. And there were two letters from the City of London Corporation, Environment department!! But like that, with exclamation marks (in my mind) because they never write to me. They don’t phone me, nothing. It’s like they no longer love me. Then suddenly, boom, TWO letters arrive. I was so excited. But sadly, it wasn’t good news, nor just asking about my new shoulder. It was about rubbish. Basically, our cleaner put two bags of rubbish outside the door and Veolia, my contractors (the Corporation don’t include rubbish collection in the ‘rates’, haven’t for about 20 years, cos for the mere 35 grand a year which I pay, rubbish collection is ‘extra’) missed the bags and didn’t pick them up on their rounds. And they were still there at 10 the next morning. Which is ILLEGAL, or immoral, or naughty or bad, sinful, disgusting or… not in keeping with the environmental regulations of the Corporation of London!!! So they sent me photos of the 2 bags. From about 4 different angles, in case I thought they’d photoshopped them. Yep, my shop, my bags, time stamp 10.21am, mea culpa.

The second letter again contained not much love. More it was a ‘demand!!’ for copies of my rubbish contract. Send it within 7 days or pay a Fixed Penalty Notice of £110!! (Like Boris!!) And was filled with so much unintelligible legalese gobbledygook that I thought I had been fined and was pissed off why they’d sent me a notice to pay but no information how to pay. Which I would have done, there and then, because it would have been cheaper than getting a team of lawyers to translate the letter into English. Much cheaper. But no, it was just the ‘agreement’ which I found on my section of Veolia’s website and never knew even existed. Which I forwarded on to Mr Environment Nazi, dutifully, if not totally happily.

For the money it costs to run an entire department of jobsworth tossers, finickity fuckers and pedantic prima-donnas, never mind 16 lawyers to draught letters in such a way that no ‘normal’ human being can understand them, you could engage an entire platoon of ‘recycling operatives’ and a squadron of garbage trucks to take with them. And even then there’d be some money left to pay off all the redundancy payments for all those worthless bureaucrats who really should be unemployed for the good of mankind.

Otherwise it was a great day.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx